Pali High Artist Wins Houck Annual Thanksgiving Card Contest

By LILY TINOCO | Reporter 

Palisades Charter High School student Cece Dale was recently chosen as the winner of Houck Construction’s Thanksgiving Card Design contest—a contest that invited Southern California high school artists to submit an original piece of art that would be used for Houck’s Thanksgiving card.

The ninth-grader said she submitted a piece of work that highlighted the essence of both family and nature.

“I wanted to include nature because the time of the season that Thanksgiving comes around is when the leaves change color,” Dale said to the Palisadian-Post. “But I also feel like Thanksgiving itself is about family, so I wanted to put that in there as well. I ended up drawing a bunch of trees, and in the middle of trees, there is a house.”

She explained that she drew the piece on her iPad and printed it out onto a canvas.

Dale was awarded $1,000 from Los Angeles-based Houck Construction for a college fund, $1,000 matched from Jonathan Carr of Compass Realty and the opportunity to display her artwork at the Malibu Contemporary Art Gallery. She also won coaching sessions by internationally acclaimed photographer Bobbi Bennett.

The Malibu Contemporary Art Gallery, located on Cross Creek Road, hosted and sponsored an art exhibition on Thursday, November 19.

“It was really fun, it was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Dale said about the event. “I felt like I was a celebrity or something.”

Owner of the gallery Lori Mills praised Dale’s piece of work and the opportunity to support the youth and their artistry.

“The piece that she won for is so beautiful … the whole premise was this sense of home, which I think is so meaningful,” Mills said. “And it’s so important right now to support kids … so to give her this show and support our sense of community, it was a beautiful, positive moment in time.

“We’ve had our challenges the last number of months—especially owning a gallery—and I would say this was one of the highlights of this whole pandemic, having Cece’s show.”

Guests were invited to a patio outside the gallery, with regulations in place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Only five or six people were allowed in the gallery at one time.

Dale said nine of her original pieces were also displayed at the exhibit, including work that she created before and after the submission of her original Thanksgiving card.

Dale explained that she has had an interest in art for years—since she was about 5 years old—and has drawn inspiration from the art around her: from her dad’s friends, who have a career in animation, to the comic books her mom would create to capture her family’s fun memories.

Dale creates digital media on ProCreate on her iPad, but said she enjoys opening her sketchbook and creating some pencil drawings as well.

The Marquez Knolls resident shared that she has taken art more seriously in the last year, and is learning a lot in her current art class at Pali High. She hopes to get into an advanced art class ahead of the upcoming school year.

Dale said she would love to land a job in animation “or somewhere in the cartoon world” in the future.