By Lindsey Bever
lbever@neighborsgo.com

Andrew Bark was an artist.

“He would paint on anything,” said his mother, Mary Bark. “He’d paint on a tree. He’d paint on a wall. He’d paint on wood. He was inspired by music and color and shape and form. He really had his own personal style that reflected his funny, wonderful sense of humor and personality.”

The Jesuit College Preparatory School graduate went off to the University of Kansas to study art in 1998. His senior year of college he was diagnosed with Ewings sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

“He gave it a good fight but of course he succumbed like nine months later,” Mary Bark said.

That was in 2002.

Almost immediately, his buddy Seth Berend set up the Andrew W. Bark ’98 Memorial Scholarship, a partial scholarship awarded each year to an incoming Jesuit senior who excels in painting, sculpture, ceramics or any other visual arts medium. His friend Tripper Clancy, along with the Barks, created Art for Andy, an annual art auction, to raise funds for the scholarship.

Art for Andy, The Last Dance, which was the final scholarship fundraiser, was held June 25 at Dallas Contemporary, where more than 500 people raised about $50,000 though a silent auction, selling pieces by local and international artists for $100 to more than $4,000. It was just under the founders’ goal of $65,000, the amount needed to get fully endowed, cofounder Clancy said. Now, the founders are relying on donations to bridge the financial gap.

Full tuition for the memorial scholarship will go into effect around 2014-2015, Clancy said.

The scholarship fund has paid for increasing percentages of young artists’ educations at Jesuit:  Luis Carrera in 2008, Drew Bieler in 2009, Nick Baker in 2010 and Garrett Toledo this year.

But, more than money, the scholarship has provided inspiration and confidence, recipients said.

Carrera, the first Andrew W. Bark ’98 Memorial Scholarship recipient, went on to study landscape architecture at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif. For him, it was a pure honor, he said, “very humbling and exciting all at the same time.”

And although at a school with an academic and athletic environment, scholarship recipients are not chosen based on their grades because Andrew was not a strait A student, Clancy said.

“We want it to be someone who’s real, someone who’s got raw artistic ability, and give them the confidence to think they can actually be an artist,” he said.

For Bieler, it did just that.

“It was more like a mental thing,” said Bieler, who is studying industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I. “I never really thought about doing art before at all until I won the scholarship and then after that, I actually thought about it and discovered that I’m actually really interested in pursuing art.”

Clancy said the final fundraiser was a good way to achieve closure, “for everybody to say goodbye to Andrew. This is what we set out to do and now we’re hanging it up.”

“It’s incredibly meaningful to us because it’s in honor of my son, and they’ve kept his memory alive,” Mary Bark said, crying. “We’ve been able to help students at Jesuit who are a lot like Andrew. … I hope that they live their lives passionately, studying and pursuing their art.”

To make a donation to the Andrew W. Bark ’98 Memorial Scholarship fund, visit artforandy.org.

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Lindsey Bever is a reporter for neighborsgo and can be reached at lbever@neighborsgo.com or 214-977-8051.