With every stroke whether it be from a pen, pen­cil or paint­brush Dy­lan Sama­roo con­tin­ues to make his school and his par­ents proud. He, how­ev­er, sur­passed even his own ex­pec­ta­tions when he made the Mer­it List in the CSEC ex­am­i­na­tions.

He scored the eighth high­est marks in the Caribbean in the Art ex­am, along with five oth­er stu­dents in the re­gion.

“I know I was go­ing to do well but I did not think that I was go­ing to do so well,” said the 17-year-old stu­dent at his Her­mitage Vil­lage, La Ro­maine home.

Im­pressed with his im­pec­ca­ble art­work in Form Three, his teacher at Na­pari­ma Col­lege asked him if he would con­sid­er writ­ing CSEC ex­ams for Art in Form Four.

“Now, we have a lot more work with SBA’s and stuff in Form Five so my teacher said if I did art in Form Five it would not give me that much time to study and pre­pare for ex­ams so she pro­posed to do it a year ear­ly.”

Sama­roo al­so sat the CSEC June 2020 tech­ni­cal draw­ing ex­am that year. In Jan­u­ary he wrote four oth­er CSEC sub­jects and he passed them with fly­ing colours. They were Physics, Maths, Eng­lish A and Eng­lish B.

Now Sama­roo is prepar­ing to write ten sub­jects in the June CSEC ex­ams, in­clud­ing Bi­ol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Physics, Maths, Add Maths, Eng­lish A, Eng­lish B, French and Span­ish.

With al­ready so much on his plate, you may won­der why he added art to his timetable? Well, he has al­ways loved art.

“I re­mem­ber draw­ing in first year and my teacher took my draw­ing and she was like, ‘What! How is he draw­ing so good,’ and she put it in front the class by the white­board and the teach­ers would walk in and they would be like ‘who drew this? How did they draw this so good?’”

Ad­mit­ting that his aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ments were no walk in the park, Sama­roo said they re­quired a lot of hard work.

“It is re­al­ly about time man­age­ment, for now, you have to sac­ri­fice, some of things like watch­ing TV and scrolling through so­cial me­dia and stuff, and pri­or­i­tiz­ing your work. Af­ter ex­ams, you have all the time to re­lax.”

For the art ex­am, Sama­roo sub­mit­ted ten pieces in the cat­e­go­ry of paint­ing, mixed me­dia and draw­ing. His fi­nal pieces were a paint­ing of an Ocelot and a draw­ing of a com­po­si­tion of veg­eta­bles.

Asked whether he would be pur­su­ing art in the fu­ture, he said, “I think I could pur­sue it. I’ve had a lot of peo­ple ask me to paint them or draw them I might look at it as a source of in­come.”

Sama­roo has won sev­er­al lo­cal art com­pe­ti­tions in­clud­ing a draw­ing of the Fa­tel Raza­ck for an In­di­an Ar­rival Day com­pe­ti­tion while an­oth­er one of his pieces was post­ed up by Pow­er­gen at Wright­son Road.

His proud moth­er Shar­da Bis­soon-Sama­roo said his re­sults ex­ceed­ed their ex­pec­ta­tions.

“We were sur­prised and hum­bled at the same time. We did not ex­pect for him to reach this ac­com­plish­ment even though his grades were re­al­ly well.”

How­ev­er, she said from the ten­der age of five he was draw­ing char­ac­ters from his favourite tele­vi­sion shows. They even­tu­al­ly en­rolled him in art class­es.

As Sama­roo con­tin­ues to ex­cel aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, he is hop­ing to win a schol­ar­ship. “It is a pos­si­bil­i­ty be­cause I have al­ways done well in school,” he said.