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Passion for art is the force behind Janesville Craig grad

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Craig student art

Artwork from Craig Senior Rachel Myers

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Rachel E. Myers

JANESVILLE — You might envy Rachel Myers.

She’s a bright, funny, cheerful, attractive young woman who teachers rave about. She knows, at age 18, what she wants to do with her life, and she has shown promise in her chosen field.

She’s also missing a foot, the result of a boating accident when she was a little girl.

Myers, the daughter of Renee Myers of Janesville and Pete Myers of Beloit, graduated with the rest of her class from Craig High School on Thursday.

If you ask her, she’ll nonchalantly tell you about her foot, but otherwise you wouldn’t notice it, teachers say.

“I think it shouldn’t matter,” Myers said.

Myers actually jokes about it. Her friends picked up on that, organizing a campaign for students to vote her the senior girl with the best legs for the school yearbook.

She won. She also was named “most artistic.”

Other students always want to see Myers’ latest project and marvel at her creativity, said art teacher Maria Brown.

“When she gets started, she goes at it ’til it gets completed,” said art teacher Amy Cossette. “She finishes early, and she’s very creative.”

Myers’ humor comes out in her work.

Consider a teapot she made in ceramics class. It’s in the shape of a head. The spout is a tongue glazed lime green. Title: “Vomiting Teaman.”

She turned one of her prosthetics into fish with a colorful paint job.

She also can be serious, as in a series of drawing she did this year about being an amputee.

“I haven’t seen a student go that in-depth, personally, into their artwork,” Brown said. “I think it’s healing, too, because it’s part of who she is.”

Myers was sitting on her father’s speedboat on the Rock River near Beloit during the summer after first grade when it happened. Something made the boat jump, throwing Rachel into the water. The boat ran over her, and the propeller cut into her leg, about halfway up her left calf.

The next fall, she moved from Beloit to Janesville and entered Monroe School. She was in a wheelchair for half that year.

Recovery was difficult. She had to take medication, or the phantom pain would wake her up at night. Phantom pain is when nerves tell the brain that the lost limb is hurting.

She still feels short bursts of pain from the nonexistent limb, but she handles it without medication, she said.

“I cried a lot when I was little,” she recalled.

She doesn’t remember harassment by other kids through all her years of schooling, however.

She has adjusted to her artificial limb. She ran in the fourth- and fifth-grade track meets and played softball in middle school.

But art is her passion.

Summer classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design opened her eyes in many ways. She learned about going beyond good technique to reach the emotion and creativity in an artwork, she said.

She plans to attend Carroll University in Waukesha to study art. She hasn’t decided what her specialty will be. Photography is a possibility. Myers’ dream job is to be a photographer for National Geographic.

“I would love to go beyond all the tourist attractions of the world and see how the people really are and tell their stories,” she said.

Talking to her, it’s not hard to imagine her two feet stirring up dust on the African savannah or trudging up a slope in the Himalayas.