The little artist

EVERY year since 2010, Ausenco Limited produces an annual calendar with a Health, Safety, Environment and Community (HSEC) theme.
Ausenco is a multi-national engineering, procurement, construction management, and operations service provider to the energy and resources sectors. It is the joint venture (JV) partner of leading Papua New Guinea engineering and project management company Kramer Ausenco.
The company runs a HSEC drawing competition yearly and invites children of staff from its JVs and alliances in the countries it operates in to participate. The winning entries are selected to appear in the next year’s calendar.
Last year, seven-year-old Emersyn Geo’s drawing ‘Safe travel options: on the road’ was published in Ausenco’s Journey Safety-themed 2017 HSEC Calendar. His drawing focused on traffic warning signs that indicate hazards ahead on the road.
Emersyn’s parents are from PNG and the Solomon Islands. His mother Leona Eka is an architect and works with Kramer Ausenco’s office in Honiara, Solomon Islands.
Emersyn is in grade two at Zion Christian Academy School in Honiara, where he loves the subjects of science and social studies, and likes to write stories and draw pictures to illustrate his tales. He became interested in drawing when he was four-years-old.
“I like to draw because it’s enjoyable and makes me imagine different things using colours. I like to draw animals, plants, rocks, cars, superheros, mostly whatever I find intriguing,” he says.
He sometimes studies pictures from books and draws them, or pauses cartoon movies to draw his favourite characters.
“Sometimes I draw from memory. Like once when mum drove past the American Embassy and I saw the Great Seal of the United States. I got home and drew the seal from what I could remember,” he says.
Emersyn experiments using many colours, utensils and media, such as paint, paper, tracing paper, newspaper, sticks, glue and scissors.
He is also very good at constructing and has built a wooden craft butterfly, with each piece cut to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, and painted different colours. It now hangs suspended in front of their house.
“My favourite toys are Lego. I like to build them, then take them apart, and rebuild them into something else using the same pieces,” says Emersyn.
He wants to be an inventor or artist when he completes high school, and looks at his mum’s university and work freehand sketches because it inspires him to be like or better than her.
Besides Ausenco’s HSEC Children’s Drawing contest, Emersyn was a finalist in 2015 in the Ela Motors Dream Car Art contest in PNG.
Children were asked to design their dream car, showing how these vehicles would create a better future for the community.
Emersyn drew himself riding a huge Bird of Paradise clutching his dream car-one that eradicated pollution.
He is always happy and proud when he is a finalist in these contests because it tells him he understood the idea behind the competition, and drew well. He aims to make his pictures better in every competition.
Emersyn likes to see other children’s drawings to help him develop his talent, and hopes his work will encourage more children to take up the art.
He is enthusiastic about new and exciting competitions this year, particularly the Nature Conservancy school drawing contest which is about drawing and telling a traditional story about the Hawksbill turtle and how it is an endangered species today.
Emersyn and his mother Leona, love engaging in these contests because it enables him at an early age to think and problem solve, and best of all-imagine.