Painting the packet: Love of ketchup helps Mt. Lebanon student earn scholarship
Caitlin Harhai’s realistic depiction of her favorite condiment
Black-and-white sketch by Caitlin Harhai
Caitlin Harhai will attend the Calhoun Discovery Program at Virginia Tech to study industrial design next year.
An example of Caitlin Harhai’s “American consumption” theme for her sustained investigation.
When it comes to enjoying the leading brand of America’s favorite condiment, Caitlin Harhai takes it up a notch.
“I carry Heinz Ketchup anytime I go somewhere that’s not Pittsburgh. I just love it so much,” the Mt. Lebanon resident said.
“The other ketchup packets they have there, if it’s not Heinz, it doesn’t taste right. They’d better have Heinz Ketchup, or else I’m just going to buy my own.”
Or, as she demonstrated during a family vacation in Colorado, she’ll search high and low for it.
“They didn’t have Heinz Ketchup at the airport, and I didn’t have any ketchup with me. I looked through every single restaurant there that had ketchup packets out,” she recalled. “Finally, Bruegger’s Bagels had Heinz Ketchup packets. So I walked halfway across the airport just to get Heinz Ketchup packets for my home fries.”
So when she embarked on a Mt. Lebanon High School art class project that represented something relatively new for her, she chose one of those hard-to-find items as her subject.
“I was motivated by – this sounds cheesy – my love for ketchup just to make it really stand out and be good,” she said.
Mission accomplished: Caitlin submitted her dazzlingly lifelike portrait of a packet as part of the portfolio that helped earn her the 2020 Mt. Lebanon Artists Market Scholarship. She and classmate Katie Doncourt were awarded $1,000 each by the Mt. Lebanon Partnership, a nonprofit organization with the mission of creating and maintaining a vibrant community.
For Caitlin, what really stands out in the whole process is that she has red-green color blindness, which affects fewer than one-half of 1% of women.
The daughter of Doug and Beth Harhai was in middle school when she learned that she’d bucked the odds.
“I had to have my nurse write a little note confirming that I was colorblind,” she said. “My friends, they just didn’t believe me, because we were learning about genetics and how rare it is.”
As an aspiring artist, she acted accordingly.
“I really only focused on graphite and charcoal, the straight black-and-white media, because that was what was easy for me. I could focus on the detail and not have to worry about the color,” Caitlin said. “When you add color, it creates a whole new set of problems, even for people who aren’t colorblind.”
Eventually, she upped the chromatic ante with her acrylic ketchup painting, to fulfill an 11th-grade art class assignment.
“I’ve done a lot of research about color theory so I can better understand it, not necessarily based on my intuition alone, but based on textbooks and facts. Like if you mix burnt sienna and the green, you’re going to get a more muted tone. I had to read about that. I couldn’t see it,” she said.
“I just have had to learn in kind of a different way than most people, but I’m definitely experimenting more, because it’s really fun to me, seeing what I can do.”
The Heinz piece became part of her “sustained investigation,” a series of works exploring a common theme. Caitlin’s started simply with edibles: “I like food. Who doesn’t like food?”
But subjects like her grandfather’s antique yellow-and-black “Steelers” Buick prompted her to expand the subject matter.
“I couldn’t limit myself to just painting food the entire time. I just needed something different,” she said. “So I kept painting things, and I realized that I was painting everything that was American consumption.”
She submitted another painting along those lines, a pack of cigarettes, as part of her scholarship portfolio, which also included a black-and-white sketch of Audrey Hepburn looking much more stylish with a holder for her smoke.
The scholarship will help pay for expenses when Caitlin attends the Calhoun Discovery Program at Virginia Tech to study industrial design. The program, launched in 2019, breaks down traditional academic barriers by collaborating with students from other disciplines to tackle real-world problems alongside industry leaders.
And if the university doesn’t carry it, you know what she’ll be taking to Blacksburg, Va., to enhance the flavor of her food.