72F Forecast »

January 7, 2009

Portrait of the Artists

Meet three unique talents defining the face of the South Florida cultural scene.

Carol Prusa, fine artist

Carol Prusa never would have guessed that she was destined to be an artist.

“I grew up with a family that didn’t go to art museums,” says the Boca Raton artist, who has been increasingly renowned for her silverpoint drawings over the past few years. “There wasn’t art hanging on the walls, nobody talked about art, and I didn’t know any artists.”

In fact, Prusa never picked up a paintbrush during her childhood in Chicago. The arts were eliminated from public grade school and middle school curriculums due to budget cuts. And, in high school, Prusa was too busy hovering over complex mathematical equations and molecular structures to even consider taking an art class.

She entered the University of Illinois as a chemistry major but quickly became disillusioned by her overly competitive peers. After meeting an artist, Prusa decided to take a drawing class, where she discovered her hidden talent.

Prusa earned her bachelor’s degree in medical illustration in 1980, but, after a brief foray into the working world (“I didn’t have the temperament to work for anybody”), she finally yielded to the artist within.

After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from Drake University in 1985 and teaching for several years, Prusa moved to South Florida and accepted a job as an associate professor of art at Florida Atlantic University in 1999.

“My work used to be really colorful, and then I moved to Florida,” she says. “You just look outside, and everything is so colorful and so vibrant and so intense that I thought, how could I compete with that?”

Prusa now works in black and white—and every shade of gray in between. She has become increasingly recognized for her unusual acrylic domes, inspired by Spanish cathedrals, which she decorates with elaborate silverpoint drawings and illuminates with fiber optic lights. The result is a sparkling fusion of organic and synthetic designs that a writer for The Tennessean described as “invoking the interconnectedness of all things.”

The art world has taken notice of Prusa’s original style. Her work has been showcased locally—at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale—nationally (recently, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn.) and abroad (including in Cyprus). She also received the 2008 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, as well as other prestigious honors and grants.

“What I hope people get from my work is a brief pause in their life,” Prusa says. “Maybe they’ll breathe slightly differently for a while … and, then, when they leave, they’re changed. I always think of art [works] like they’re viruses: They contaminate things around them because, once you participate with them, you’re changed.”

 

Sanjeev Sirpal, filmmaker

The story of how Sanjeev Sirpal became a filmmaker could be a film in itself.

A few months after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Florida in 2001, the Palm Beach native was working for the Associated Press and the Lake City Reporter, and living in Gainesville with his on-again-off-again girlfriend. After one final breakup, Sirpal decided that it was time to explore his true lifelong passion: movies.

“I had been studying film unofficially since I was 4,” he explains.

Sirpal cold-called a producer working on a television pilot on a Monday and was invited to a meeting that Thursday.“He was like, ‘Where do you live?’” Sirpal recalls. “I was living in Florida, and I lied and said Burbank [Calif.]. And he said, ‘OK, great, so I’ll see you on Thursday.’”

Three days later, Sirpal showed up in Los Angeles for the meeting. Upon landing a job as a production assistant, Sanjeev packed up his life in Florida and settled in California.

“I put blinders on and kind of just started running,” he says.

Three years later, while working at Endeavor Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, he put the finishing touches on the script of his first feature film, “Screw Cupid,” a quirky romantic comedy told from the male perspective.

“They say rule No. 1 is to write what you know,” says Sirpal, 28, with a laugh. “And, if there is one thing I know, it’s romantic angst.”

After auditions, financing and other initial plans were finished, the film spent four months in preproduction and was then shot in 24 days. Eight months later, it was edited and ready to roll.

In March 2008, “Screw Cupid” premiered at the Sunscreen Film Festival in St. Petersburg. Last May, it was shown at the Delray Beach Film Festival, selling out the 330-seat Crest Theater. A decade earlier, he had taken his high school exams in that same theater. Now, because there wasn’t an open seat, he was standing at the screening of his first movie. The film won the Audience Award for Best Feature before going on to the Seattle International Film Festival in June.

What’s next for Sirpal? You’ll just have to wait for the sequel.

“Screw Cupid” is being screened at Dolce Amore Café in Delray Beach on Dec. 5. RSVP required; call 561/213-5737 for more information.

 

Nadine Sierra, opera singer

Many little girls spend their childhoods singing songs from Disney movies. But very few sound like Nadine Sierra did when she was 5, as she belted out songs from “The Little Mermaid” in her pool.

“I would go in my pool and sing,” says Sierra, 20. “My mom [Melinda] thought, ‘There is something kind of interesting about [her daughter’s] voice.’”

Melinda signed her up for voice lessons when she was 6. Four years later, Sierra and her teachers realized that she had operatic potential.

“It was still a young voice, but the clarity and the bell-like quality of it was just so operatic,” Sierra explains. “I guess [opera] is what I geared myself toward because that’s what was most comfortable for me and my voice.”

When Sierra was 14, Melinda, who works as a bank teller, and her father, Robert, who is a fire inspector for Broward County, moved the family from Fort Lauderdale to Delray Beach so Sierra could attend Dreyfoos School of the Arts. She also was invited to join the Palm Beach Opera, where she got her first real taste of opera performance at 16, as the Sandman in “Hansel and Gretel.”

“[While singing,] I had to run around the stage, climb on a rock, throw all this glitter everywhere, and try not to hit the singers in the face while they were watching me,” she says. “And I realized then that, yeah, this is harder than I think.”

But Sierra has risen to the challenge, receiving first place in three major opera competitions: the junior division of the 2007 Palm Beach Opera Competition, the 2007 Marilyn Horne Foundation Awards Competition, and the 2008 National Society of Arts and Letters Voice Competition for Opera at Lynn University. She also has placed in other national voice and opera competitions.

Currently, Sierra is studying voice at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, and she enjoys returning to South Florida for time off from the nearly seven hours she spends each day studying vocal literature, history, theory and singing. But, to Sierra, every hour is worth it.
“My ultimate goal is to become an opera singer,” she says. “A real opera singer—singing at the Met, singing at La Scala [in Milan, Italy] and hopefully [in] Germany. I want to sing everywhere.”

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to Boca Raton Magazine »