Touched By Angels, Las Vegas Sun. May 23, 1996

Touched by angels Lisa Sciortino Thursday, May 23, 1996 | 11:59 a.m. It was April 19, the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and, coincidentally, Ragen Mendenhall's 18th birthday. The Las Vegas Academy senior was sketching a picture of a feathery-winged angel cradling a lifeless child. At their feet, a mourner screamed. Just then, a tribute to the bombing's 168 victims flashed across the TV screen. That's when Ragen's drawing came to life. "It was then that I realized that that's what this was. It was sort of my own tribute," she recalls. The work, which she simply titled "April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City," was named Congressman's Choice at the national 1996 Congressional Art Competition, a category Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev., created specifically to honor Ragen's piece. "It moved me so much that I just felt that I had to do it. I almost started to cry when I saw it," Ensign says. "The pain in that woman's face and seeing that baby ... to me, it was almost indescribable how she captured the emotion ... of how it must be to lose your child like that. I could almost see myself or my wife in there." Ragen also won second place in the Nevada division of the contest for an owl-themed entry titled "Winged Heart," which will hang in Ensign's Washington, D.C., office for a year. It will take the place of her winning entry from last year, "Guardians of the Wall," another angel tribute, this one to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ensign recalls his visit to the wall prior to the contest. "It literally felt like angels were surrounding the place," he says. "When I saw her drawing ... I just couldn't believe it, and then I talked to her and (learned) she had never been there." The awards, however, are just another notch on this young artist's already impressive palette. Ragen has published a poster-sized print of her Egyptian-themed work, "The Thirteenth Hour," which sells in a dozen local art galleries for about $30. Studio West Summerlin is one of them. Manager Robyn Loggins describes the teen's artistic style as "visionary." "She has got a real strong spiritual quality about her work and she's very imaginative." So far, Loggins says, she's sold a few of the prints. Not bad for a piece that started out as a project for her Academy art class. "I just really got into it," Ragen says, "and mine got a lot more complicated than everyone else's." It took her five months to complete. Besides the piece's offbeat clocks, planets and hieroglyphics, it's the female subject's beautiful face that stands out the most. Faces, Ragen says, are "probably the most important part of any of my pieces. Just getting every bit of emotion in the eyes" takes up most of her creative time. "I don't think that art is art unless it makes you feel a certain way, it makes a statement, it says something," she says. Her angels, for example, "have power to them." "Everybody seems to portray angels as really submissive and peaceful and I believe that," she says, "but I try to put a lot of power and uplifting things in my work." Along with a few eerie twists here and there. Ragen's daunting, spookier side came through on the cover art she was called upon to create for the mystery novel "Deadline" (Cahill Publishing) by John Dunning. The story, about a young Jane Doe killed during a circus fire, inspired Ragen to draw the haunting image that "stuck in my mind after reading it." She recently began writing and illustrating her own children's poetry book. Meanwhile, she stays busy with other artsy projects -- creating stained glass, dying fabric, customizing antique furniture. She's set to begin teaching children's art classes at Studio West Summerlin this weekend. Ragen has also painted several large murals on the walls throughout her own home (there's a mermaid over the bathtub) and a handful in other people's homes. She'd like to continue to "go bigger" with her work but knows it will be time-consuming. "Little pieces take me forever to do and if I try to go big with it, it's really tough to get the same quality without getting frustrated." Maybe she'll figure out how this fall when she heads to the Art Institute of Seattle to study illustration on scholarship and, she hopes, send her arts career into full swing. "I've heard Seattle is just really cultured and they have a lot of galleries and appreciate art more," she says. "If I'm doing halfway well here, I figure I'm gonna do great in Seattle."