Over 2,000 Jacksonville area children participated in their arts-related education programs. Over 60 professional artists had exhibits sponsored by The Imagine Foundation. They hosted numerous group shows that allowed over 40 amateur artists to exhibit their work. And they started the Asa Talcott House Concert Series where their 2007 concerts included musical genres such as jazz, opera, and barbershop.

Meet Jake Sorrill in the following Illinois Times Magazine story by AMANDA ROBERT...

Clare Lynd-Porter never thought she would be interested in high school artwork. As the founder of Jacksonville’s Imagine Foundation, she was accustomed to curating paintings and photographs from the Midwest’s finest artists. But, through an incident that she calls pure fate, Lynd-Porter met Jake Sorrill — a Routt Catholic sophomore whose only experience was working at Quizno’s and fooling around with his dad’s old camera equipment.

“I was stuck doing a high school show that I didn’t want to do and just expected snapshots,” Lynd-Porter says about her first time viewing Sorrill’s photographs. “I didn’t expect someone so talented — I gave him a whole wall.” Now a high school senior, Sorrill has recently been promoted to employee status with the Imagine Foundation after a two-year internship funded by Illinois Arts Council grants. He has exhibited photography in more than 10 shows and currently has a four-year retrospective on display at Jacksonville’s On the Wall frame shop, where he works as the main curator. In his spare time, he also co-curates at five other art spaces throughout Jacksonville and designs the layout for Imagine’s newspaper, the Jacksonville Art Talk. Sorrill has been told that he has a natural eye for composition and enjoys finding subjects that show emotion or hold special meaning. He says he works to shoot pictures from different angles and perspectives and has several that send political messages, including his “Corrupt Society,” a photograph taken of barbed wire and the Capitol building during a trip to Washington, D.C., last winter.
 

“I like to slow things down and look at them in ways other people don’t,” Sorrill says. “It’s cool when you catch things other people don’t notice.” Sorrill, who has only taken one high school photography class and two art classes, attributes his thus-far success to Lynd-Porter and says he wouldn’t be as involved in art without support from Imagine and the Jacksonville art community. While Lynd-Porter calls him one of the best artists in Jacksonville, Sorrill says that in the beginning, he didn’t even realize that his skill was anything special.  “There are kids that show their stuff and those that don’t,” he says. “There are those that don’t realize they have talent and those who are afraid to show it. “To me, they were just my photographs — but then people reacted to them.” In the future, Sorrill plans to attend art school and major in graphic design and dreams of traveling the world with a camera in his hand. He’s almost there, he says — he already has his passport. Lynd-Porter says working with Sorrill has been one of her favorite parts of the Imagine Foundation and gets excited when she thinks of how he will develop as he moves up in the art world. “He’s had almost no training,” she says. “What’s he going to be like when he meets someone who can really train him?”

More of Sorrill’s photographs can be found on his Web site, www.ifonlyphoto.com.