Micah Inak never smiles in pictures. Two gold hoop earrings on each ear sway a bit as she sits near her artwork, hanging in the Root Café. Her straightforward stare is like her illustrations and graphic work — nothing obscuring solid talent. A self portrait hung nearby shows the exact same gaze.
Micah, a Lakewood High School senior, has won so many awards in the past few years it’s hard to keep count. Her work is currently in this year’s Ohio Governor’s Youth Art exhibit; and a self portrait titled “I Have Rivers on my Mind” was featured on coffee cups for Lakewood’s recent Coffee Shop Hop.
She also won the Tri-C High School Rock-Off poster contest and had billboards featuring her designs throughout the area, through a State Farm Insurance and University Hospitals safe driving collaboration.
She also has her first solo show up at the Root.
“I live off of this,” says Micah’s mom, Frances Inak, sipping after-work coffee, her eyes wide. She keeps saying she could cry.
Micah, who describes herself as a homebody, says her mom is her biggest influence.
On large rolls of cheap brown paper, Frances used to make abstracts with pastels or melted crayons that Micah, her twin Chelsea and their brother Zac were always begging her for, no matter how many they already had.
The artworks still blanket the family’s walls. All their art does. A large bookshelf half-filled with books otherwise serves as storage for an unlimited stash of art supplies: watercolors, oil paints, pastels, pens and pencils, chalk and paper — anything, really. There are also piles of filled sketchbooks the whole family has always collaborated on to a soundtrack of Frances’ Latin music or African rhythms, and then later, the kids’ evolving tastes.
Micah remembers “the crappiest” sketchbook from 1st grade. In 5th grade, she stared looking up YouTube videos on how to draw.
With plans to study illustration at the Cleveland Institute of Art — for which she’s received multiple scholarships — Micah spent a month already at the school’s pre-college program. She’s also busy launching her own freelance company — Micah Inak Art.
Her work, which blends illustration and digital art, definitely has unique themes. Her senior project is unusual things breaking routine. A skeleton with its heart outside of its bones brushes its teeth. A car of teenagers roams an ominous landscape of mountains and giant carrots. A man waiting at a bus stop welcomes fish falling out of the sky into his fishbowl head.
“When she draws, it always tells a story, so I call her a visual storyteller,” Frances says. “It’s in her soul.”
Micah says she still needs to learn how to accurately represent her ideas and her voice on paper — a little reminder that despite her success, she is still growing.
“I’ll get there,” she says. “It’s going to get better and better. I’m not stopping. I’m going to keep pushing.”
Micah’s show will be up until Sun 5/6. She is donating 20 percent of all sales to the high school’s outreach club Help to Others (H2O).
Visit micahinakart.portfoliobox.net for more info or head over to The Root, 15118 Detroit Ave., and pick up a print.
Lakewood, OH 44107