FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Elizabeth Wood Coldicutt, CVCAF, President
Rancho Mirage, CA – May 22, 2014 – The Caroline Victoria Coldicutt Arts Foundation (CVCAF) today announced that its annual Caroline Victoria Coldicutt Scholarship Award will be granted to Wei-Chen “Blaze” Shih. Blaze, a student at Idyllwild since 2010, is from Taipei, Taiwan, has excelled in the Fashion Design program.
“Blaze encompasses the true significance of what it means to be a creative artist,” said Elizabeth Wood Coldicutt, president of the CVCAF. We are thrilled she is our CVCAF art scholarship winner this year at Idyllwild.”
According to Nancy Popp, outgoing chair of the InterArts Department at Idyllwild, “Blaze has been our Fashion visionary at every show during my time at IAA. And yet she felt there was more to do than Fashion. Blaze is a true artist; she excels in multiple disciplines, including Fashion Design, Drawing, Painting, Animation and Digital Graphics. She balances extremely strong skills with strong conceptual ideas, and the combination is stunning in her final pieces. Blaze has a sense of dissatisfaction that all artists have; in creating visionary and boundary-pushing works she doubts and wonders, always questioning if what she is creating is good enough. Her portfolio impressed many schools with its level of skill and diversity.”
Blaze has been accepted into the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
The CVCAF Art scholarship is paid annually from an endowment that was established at Idyllwild Arts Academy in January 2011. The annual award is based on artistic merit as well as financial need and is in recognition of an Idyllwild Arts student’s outstanding achievement in any creative form – fine art, music, film, theatre and dance.
The Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA provides pre-professional training in the arts and a comprehensive college preparatory curriculum to a diverse student body of 300 gifted young artists from over 40 countries. Idyllwild offers a disciplined college preparatory program for grades 9-12 and post-graduates along with world-class training in creative writing, dance, film & video, interdisciplinary arts, music, theatre and visual art.
The purpose of the CVCAF scholarship award is to inspire students to reach their highest level of achievement in their art discipline and to encourage and support student artists toward their creative endeavors. Since 2006, our foundation has gifted more than 50 art scholarships to students whose passion is painting and fine arts at these schools:
- Emily Carr University, Vancouver, British Columbia
- Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA
- Palm Valley School, Rancho Mirage, CA
- Shawnigan Lake School, Vancouver, Island, British Columbia
- The Academy, Palm Desert, CA
- Since 2009, CVCAF has gifted several grants to benefit
students whose passion is filmmaking through the Mary Pickford Institute of Film Education and Mobile Film Classroom.org to provide digital media instruction to under-served youth in Los Angeles County
- To foster cross-cultural awareness and understanding through art, since 2011 the CVCAF has provided funds for art materials and supplies to two schools in China – Guanyindang Primary School in the suburbs of Jingzhou, China and the Dandelion School, a boarding school for children of rural migrant laborers located in Beijing.
About the Caroline Victoria Arts Foundation
The Caroline Victoria Coldicutt Arts Foundation (CVCAF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation formed in 2006 to commemorate the artistic passion of Caroline Victoria Coldicutt. The CVCAF offers three main initiatives to inform and assist aspiring student artists about how they can implement their creative ideas that can positively impact their families, schools, communities and the world. Our philanthropic efforts include offering support to young artists through scholarships at various schools in Canada and the United States. The Caroline Victoria Rose for the Arts provides funding of our endowment initiatives as well as provides a lasting reminder of the beauty art brings to the lives of each and every one of us. In 2014, we will introduce our Caroline Victoria Online Arts Festival (CVOAF), an initiative designed for student artists without boundaries. For more information about CVCAF or to make a donation, please visit https://www.cvcartsfoundation.org.