CULVER CITY : 9-Year-Old’s Compassionate Artistry Strikes a Nerve Half a World Away

If being discovered is a result of timing and talent, Bryn Beery was lucky on both counts.

The month was February, days after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake ravaged Kobe, Japan. The 9-year-old’s talent was evident in a picture she drew and an open letter she wrote to students at an elementary school that was damaged by the temblor.

Beery’s artwork has since become the design on 30,000 T-shirts that a Japanese apparel company printed and distributed free throughout Kobe after the earthquake. The shirts went to disaster relief workers, people living in shelters and to students.

Even players in the national Japanese high school baseball championship tournament sported Beery’s design during the competition.

The illustration is of a three-dimensional box with the words love , peace and care linked to two red hearts. Written below the box is the message: “You know I got scared to [sic] when the earthquake hit here. My name is Bryn Beery. I am 8 years old. I live in Los Angeles. I hope your [sic] okay! Bye!”

Not surprisingly, the young artist is awed by the attention her artwork has received.

“Nothing this big has ever happened to me before,” said Bryn, who will enter fourth grade this fall at Willows Community School in Culver City. “I wasn’t really thinking of anything when I drew [the picture]. At first, I didn’t really know what to draw.”

A private school, Willows Community was founded in September by a group of parents who were dissatisfied with the public and private school choices in Los Angeles. They started with about 100 students, and have 135 enrolled for next year.

Beery’s picture was one of about 18 drawings sent to Japan by a combined class of third- and fourth-graders who had a simple intent: Cheer up the people of Kobe after the earthquake. The students also raised more than $250 from a bake sale for the Kobe relief effort.

With the Northridge earthquake still fresh in her mind, Beery said, she immediately understood how the Japanese children were feeling.

Though the youngster still shudders as she remembers being briefly trapped in her room on Jan. 17, 1994, by a bookcase that had fallen in front of her door, the Kobe disaster put her own experience into perspective.

“We were lucky that we didn’t have an earthquake as big as theirs,” she said, her eyes growing bigger at the thought. “The city of Kobe is destroyed.”

The drawings from Beery and her classmates were hand-carried to Japan by Jerry Podany, who has a daughter in first grade at Willows. As head of antiquities conservation for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Podany was traveling to Kobe to help the curators of museums there restore artwork damaged or disturbed by the earthquake.

Once in Kobe, Podany said, he had no idea what to do with the illustrations, since most of the elementary schools were shut down. So he asked one of the Kobe museum curators if he could take the pictures to the school that his children attended.

“There were a few days there when I didn’t think I could do what the kids had asked,” he said.

Soon after he returned to the United States, an executive from World Company Ltd.--an apparel maker located in Kobe--contacted Podany about using Beery’s picture on T-shirts they were printing as a sign of goodwill after the disaster. World executives had seen Beery’s work hanging at the elementary school where the Japanese museum curator had brought them.

The company is also interested in using Beery’s design as the logo on shirts printed in support of ecological issues.

Earlier this month, World sent more than 200 of Beery’s T-shirts to the Willows school, enough for all the students and staff. She said seeing people wearing the shirts around town has made her feel good, and a little bit important.

But while she finds her sudden fame exciting, Beery has not let it go to her head. Asked if she might start charging companies money to use her logo, she dismissed the idea.

“I’m happy just letting people use it,” she said. “I did this to make the people in Kobe feel better.”