Barrows Featured Artist of August 2025: Courtney Rodig

Courtney Rodig, a 2023 Westwood High School graduate and rising junior at the University of Virginia studying Chemistry and Computer Science, has always been drawn to art.
 
“I’ve been doing it my whole life,” says the 20-year-old, “So I can’t even remember when it first started. In preschool I would make my friends stay inside for recess and draw all day instead of going outside,”
 
Laughing through that memory, Courtney added how her grandmothers from both sides of the family were artists. The art gene runs deep.
 
Back in 2020 Courtney began working on her piece titled “Tibetan Woman.” The in-depth and incredibly detailed drawing took about four months and over 100 hours to complete. “It was during COVID, and I literally had nothing else to do. I told myself, ‘Let’s try to get as hyper-realistic as I can.’”
 
For the first time, Courtney used colored pencils as she crafted the portrait. Typically, she uses acrylic pants. “Tibetan Woman” was displayed by the Attleboro Arts Association at the Attleboro Arts Museum alongside some of her other pieces, “Young Girl” and “Woman from Nepal.” Courtney also received an honorable mention for “Tibetan Woman” on behalf of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, The Boston Globe, and Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards.
 
Courtney elaborated on her time spent at home during lockdown, “You’re just so trapped in your house, and I think being so young, I had barely experienced the world, so I was very drawn to cultures beyond where I live.”
 
Courtney originally found the woman’s photo on the pages of National Geographic and was instantly intrigued by what she saw, since the imagery was from a world completely different from the world she knew, as well as the level of detail.
 
“I was like, ‘Oh, that looks like a challenge, let me see if I can draw all of those wrinkles and every thread of her head scarf.’”
 
In high school, Courtney took AP drawing & painting.
 
“Once I got to high school I thought, ‘Maybe I do have some sort of degree of talent for this,’ It was a lot of fun, especially because in art classes you think about things that you wouldn’t do naturally.”
 
Courtney gave the example of a time students spent a whole class period drawing spheres.
 
“I would never do that by myself, but you can totally implement those skills when you are painting or drawing by yourself, which I did appreciate a lot.”
 
Her high school art experience helped her develop those vital foundational skills.
 
Now that she is attending UVA, balancing school and passion can be a tricky task. Finding free time to make art has been a struggle, however; she has still been able to draw up some smaller and quicker pieces.
 
“Now that I’m in college, I find myself just doing quicker, more impressionist things. When I come back home in the summer I spend a lot more time just creating art because I realized, during the school year, it’s so hard to find time.”
 
Alongside her artistic endeavors, Courtney is currently an undergraduate research fellow at the Harvard Medical School LSP lab for liposarcoma cancer. Although Courtney is not exactly planning on taking her art to a professional career level, she does enjoy doing commissioned works here and there.
 
“I have a passion for science and tech that I want to pursue,” said Courtney, “But I also think the skills you learn from art can really be translated to any field that you go into. The job I have now, I am looking at images of individual cells in a cancer tumor and I think using my artistic eye that I learned from hyper realism helps.”
 
Isn’t it amazing how her attention to detail is utilized in her current work? No matter what you dream to pursue, involvement in the arts can give you a helpful boost. Courtney is a great example of this; a fantastically talented artist who also has a passion for the medical field.
 
To keep up with Courtney’s art or to browse through her previous works, make sure to follow her Instagram @art_courtneys
 
Congratulations, Courtney, for being our August Featured Artist! If you’d like to nominate an artist of any sort to be featured – music, acting, painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. – please email dbezdedeanu@bestversionmedia.com.