Â鶹´«Ã½

Since I graduated, I’ve been focusing on bettering my skills as an artist and taking in the world around me. Doing some traveling has allowed me to see more of what exists outside of my hometown. I am taking a sabbatical year with plans to apply to grad school and pursue a degree in Art History. Art classes forced me to step outside my creative comfort zone and grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and I have taken what I learned in those courses and applied them to my personal life. I’ve experimented with new styles and formats that previously intimidated me. Creativity is all around us and I’ve been able to slow down and search for it with greater appreciation than I had before.

Since graduating, I’ve been working at Hopscotch, an immersive art exhibit in Portland, where I engage visitors of all ages in interactive artistic experiences. Traveling has broadened my perspective on creative practice, leading me to approach work with greater curiosity and a deeper awareness of its context, including when it was made, the resources available, and the processes behind the work. This perspective has strengthened my appreciation for both historical and contemporary art while shaping my own creative process. My combined studies in psychology, human development, and art have given me strong insight into human behavior, communication, and emotional intelligence. Through art classes, I’ve learned to embrace experimentation, mistakes, and discovery as essential parts of creation. Valuing the process as much as the final piece has made me more confident as an artist and more thoughtful and intentional overall.

My time in the art studio was key to how I navigate my career today. Having space to build a portfolio of designs, meet creative individuals, and build the confidence to share my work guides my current art and design work. Outside of my professional career, I make music, shoot concert photography, and have begun to expand into real estate photography. The classes I took not only helped me develop the foundational skills to build upon these mediums, but also granted me opportunities to meet many individuals in these industries, providing me new insights and opportunities to continue growing.

I'm happy to say that creativity and art are still ever-present parts of my life. I had concerns about being a starving artist, but I'm glad to have found a career that still challenges me and applies all the learning from my college days. One of my art professors once told our class "don't underestimate what design can do" and "find your center," which are words I have posted up on my desk to this day! While I'm not painting or printmaking as much these days, I still freelance on the side which has given me opportunities to create wedding invitations, pet portraits, posters, and a variety of other hand-crafted stationery.

I work as a financial aid advisor on campus helping students make informed decisions and overcome barriers to education. One thing that really stayed with me from the Visual Concepts (2-D Design) class I took was the importance of creative thinking. As a financial aid advisor, I use this skill every day for problem-solving, strategy, and communication as I explain complex financial information to students and their families. I strongly encourage students to take a fine arts class, especially if they have never taken one before, because it can open new ways of seeing the world.

I work as a licensed tattoo artist in Portland where I manage my own studio, Sensitive Scorpio. I grew up inspired by the expressiveness of my mother’s paintings and the precision of my father’s blueprints. Attending studio art classes taught me to think about artwork more dynamically and developed my creative problem-solving skills. Tattooing brings all those influences, along with German and Mexican folk art, into a living medium, where I must think about how designs fit the body and will age along with it. Like Todd from BoJack Horseman says, "I never know if I can handle anything; that's what makes my life so exciting!"

While minoring in Fine Arts at Â鶹´«Ã½, I took more art history classes than studio classes, because I found the history of art fascinating! I developed an interest in semiotics and signification, and how they relate to art and self-expression. I have been able to connect this pursuit, as well as skills learned in studio classes, to my Digital Technology & Culture Major, as they helped me get into a Master’s degree program in Interactive Media and Communication at Quinnipiac University. While I am attending a different college for my master’s, I am still grateful for all I learned in Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s Fine Arts program.

Between painting in my home studio and leading creative work at an agency, past art classes continue to influence how I make things. Balancing creative expression with intention was a lesson learned that I like to bring into my daily life.

After Â鶹´«Ã½, I attended grad school to become an art teacher, with the goal of instilling knowledge, skills, and a lifelong curiosity and exploration of art in my students. I am currently taking time off from teaching to focus on my health and reignite my own practice. As a painter, I am drawn to creating dynamic geometric patterns in primary and secondary colors that extend outward from a center point to represent transitions of light, time, and space. I entered the Â鶹´«Ã½ art program with very rudimentary knowledge and understanding of art and practices. Art history courses introduced me to the vastness of the world of visual arts and showed me that art is not just about aesthetics but can also be about ideas, politics, and religion/spirituality. Each studio art course and instructor introduced different mediums, methods, and skills and encouraged me to explore and question both meaning and my own creative processes.

I am not only a graduate of Â鶹´«Ã½, I also retired from there as a Classroom Support Tech in the Fine Arts Dept. in 2019. I now live in central Oregon where I spend my time fishing, golfing and hiking. I am also a part time mower at our golf courses here, which supplements my income and provides me with free golf. My time at Â鶹´«Ã½ gave me some of the best years of my life. I had the best job I ever had, working with amazing colleagues and inspiring students. Although I am truly enjoying my semi-retirement, I miss everyone I worked with immensely. I am still making photographs, mainly of natural landscapes, birds and reptiles.

I landed a role in communications at the Building Industry Association of Clark County. Day to day, my time is spent at a desk and behind a camera. I am still in a relationship with my person I met in an art class at Â鶹´«Ã½ and now we spend our nights making art and music and traveling the world. I still spend time with the friends I made on campus in class, at work, and in clubs. Art doesn’t need to be made from expensive high-quality material. It is a conversation and experience for the creator and those they choose to share it with. Remember not to take things so seriously, and don’t make excuses. Just do the thing.

When I was a DTC major in 2003-2005, the program was a combination of Fine Arts and English classes. Though I came to WSU to turn my self-taught web skills into a degree, I learned a few things about my own creativity through the art program's photography classes. I then used my photos as raw materials to make art, layouts, and websites for design classes. After graduation, I got a job here in IT and it initially seemed to leave little room for artistic expression. However, I pushed in that direction and it wasn’t long before I was working on the school website and finding other random outlets for my design interests. If you try hard enough, you can find room for creativity anywhere.