PB artist to show work at National Junior Beta Competition

Kaitlyn Baucom, 14, of Poplar Bluff will take her artwork to the National Junior Beta Competition June 29-July 2 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

This is the third time she’s won first place in the state event and the right to compete at nationals.

In Savannah, Georgia, two years ago, Baucom placed 10th in the nation. Last year, COVID-19 canceled nationals in Oklahoma.

Grandparents Steve and Debbie Hager are raising Kaitlyn and her sister, Dominique.

“She’s very, very unaware of her talent,” Steve said. “She’s a typical teenager otherwise.”

The sisters were young when they moved in with their grandparents.

Steve, who is disabled, became the stay-at-home parent while Debbie continued her career as a dental hygienist.

Baucom’s left hand and lower arm are missing because of amniotic band syndrome, or ABS, which refers to a condition caused by damage to the amnion, the sac that surrounds the baby while they are in the womb. When this sac is damaged, fibrous strings or bands can enter the amniotic fluid.

As she began growing, her grandfather said, “she’d get real frustrated all the time. She wanted me to help her and I’d say ‘now Kaitlyn, how can I help you?’ I can’t comprehend. Pretty soon, she’d come in and tears would be welled up in her eyes, saying ‘I did it pop, I did it.’ And I said, ‘see,’ and then I’d get a hug and she would say ‘you always believe in me.’”

Kaitlyn’s grandparents taught her “don’t let something that’s out of your control limit you.”

She hasn’t let having one hand even remotely limit her, Steve said. She rides a bicycle and Steve’s four wheeler.

She likes anime and gaming, chess and leads the praise team at Cobblestone Christian Church. She’s taught herself to play guitar, ukulele and piano.

She’s been taking volleyball training in Cape Girardeau every other week.

“I like skateboarding,” she said. “I have a pretty nifty injury on my knee actually. It’s still in the process of healing, which I have no idea how long it will take because I did actual nerve damage to it. No, I am tough. I didn’t even cry when I did it.”

While she hadn’t been to the skateboard park since her injury, she’s painting and designing her board.

She’s got an eye for art and hasn’t taken professional art training. Kaitlyn transforms her subjects onto paper with colored pencil, graphite, charcoal and watercolor.

The artist’s career path has changed a few times in her young life.

At 5 years old, her mindset was to be a fashion designer. That’s when she switched from coloring books to drawing clothing.

“I started really young,” she said. “I’ve always liked coloring books.”

At first, she was “coloring like a child,” Baucom said. “Then I would color them better because I was like, ‘Hey, I know this looks good, but I did this better because that’s the mindset I had. I progressed to small drawings of clothing. I thought I was going to be a fashion designer.”

Designing clothing was not something “I feel like I would be comfortable doing,” she said.

Entering her freshmen year, her interest in zoology is peaking. She wants to study animals in the wild, as well as confined, before capturing them in her artwork.

After going to butterfly palaces and zoos, “it hit me, I really like them and I like drawing them,” she said. “It’s overall very interesting to me. One night, for no apparent reason, I did a bunch of research on different butterflies I found most intriguing. It didn’t seem like work to me when I did that research. I didn’t do it for an assignment, but I did research and I looked at articles. I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed the visuals. It does still correlate with art, if you look at it from certain angles, because of all the visuals and the colors and generally sight.”

She also likes math and science a lot.

“I guess it’s not about favorites. It’s just ruling out the ones I don’t like, so math and science is all that’s left.”

Continuing, Baucom said, “I don’t like English, because I’m really bad at writing. I do very, very poorly,” when her grandfather interrupted, saying, “if an A-minus is very poor.”

She added “what I mean is essays and writing are really hard for me because I write too much, because my mindset is so broad, I can’t shorten it to five sentences in a paragraph. I need to add every single thought I feel necessary, or else I won’t be able to directly get my point across. So what I’m trying to say is I get over-detailed.”

Kaitlyn admitted, “I’m not really the inspirational speech kind of person. As long as you set your mind to it, don’t let something limit you.”

“I have a great imagination, but I am not to the level where I can put that all on paper, in condensed forms, in readable forms,” she said. “My vocabulary, my extensive vocabulary, gets in the way of me writing sometimes. I’ll write something that makes sense to me, but it’s wordy. It’s unnecessarily so wordy. Then people are reading it and they’re like, what’s this? It makes so much sense to me, but not to other people. But then I’m like, I don’t want to cut anything out or else this part won’t make sense. You have to figure out how to make it all make sense.”