EIGHT Slovak children won awards during an art competition in Japan. Six of them were honoured in Bratislava on March 31 for paintings and drawings that they had entered into a competition co-organised by Kanagawa Prefecture, on Japan’s Honshu Island, the SITA newswire wrote.
A jury selected the best works from nearly 24,000 submitted by children aged 4-15 from 89 countries. In the end, it awarded only 523 of the works, of which eight were by Slovaks.
Daniel Zauška from Banská Bystrica received one of three main awards from the prefecture for his painting of the Trojan Horse.
The UNESCO Slovak Committee is in charge of delivering the awards to the talented Slovak children, but has had some difficulty tracking down some of the winners. It still has not found two of them, though it knows their names: Flavián Nehila and Matúš Kraushuber.
Katarína Hargašová, assistant to the committee’s director general, said that the situation was complicated by the fact that the paintings were sent to Japan via various institutions and had not been marked properly.
On March 31, the committee handed out awards to Beata Bencová, Andrea Hrašková, Jana Miklosiová, Daniel Zauška, Daniel Uherek and Andrej Repta.
The children chose various topics for their works: a lady with a weasel, a family, the main square in Banská Bystrica, or a conception of what snails do when they get to heaven.
The competition has taken place every two years since 1980. Its main goal is to encourage creativity in children from around the world and inspire interest in becoming more familiar with other cultures and lifestyles.
The winning works were part of the exhibition at Kanagawa Plaza for Global Citizenship.
