Art Attack
by Fritz Kreimann
There’s a thriving art community at Citrus College. Students from all over love creating and showing off what they’ve made. Creating art like paintings, drawings, photography, sculptures, and music, student artists have created some incredible pieces. The passion put into making something so personal is powerful. Art takes all kinds of discipline. It’s an awesome, expressive process that can speak volumes.
Photography is a great medium for art. It’s possible to showcase different moods, it can help expose the truth, and it can convey strong emotions. Ivan Flores is one of many students studying photography at Citrus. He has been passionate since freshman year of high school and over the years has only gotten better. What inspires him to continue to create is the stories that he hears from the people he works with, and what can come from that session.
“I like getting to know someone,” said Flores. “I like to hear their story, what they do, where they come from, and what got them into this.” He explained that growing a genuine bond with the model is one of the most important aspects of taking a great photograph.
Photography is different from a lot of other mediums because of how collaborative it can be. Portrait work and photographing models is not just about posing them in specific ways to fulfill your needs. For Flores, he wants to capture someone in their essence and bring their vision to life as best as possible. It brings him joy to bring that out of people and creates a better picture overall. His process starts with asking how the client is doing and ensuring they are as comfortable as possible.
“Once they start to loosen up, it all just starts to fall into place,” Flores said. “The image at the end, when they’re more relaxed, it comes out more natural, it makes a big difference.” Photography can be one of the most social mediums of art.
Flores has taken countless photos, but his favorite ones tend to be his astrophotography or work with clients he admires. A beautiful photo he shot of the night sky shows millions of stars all across. The dark shadow of a mountain divides the bottom half where a parked car with red lights pouring from the windows is all that can be seen. The colors used are aesthetically pleasing and the vastness of space is breathtaking.
Flores also had the opportunity to photograph one of his favorite bands called Movements. He captured each member mid-performance, a starry effect with some of the lights in the background giving it that out-of-this-world feel.
Anyone can draw. It’s a simple way to get a message across without any words and can make one realize that there is so much beauty and magic in the world. So much time and dedication has to go into creating amazing, detailed images.
Georgia Spencer, a biology major, defines art as “your perception of reality, it’s human expression. It bears and expresses a special relationship to the human experience.” The piece she has created depicts the inside of a person’s head as a maze. Each line is intricately crafted and has perfect shading, it looks like it would be possible to jump in there and get lost.
“It represents feeling lost within your thoughts and the confusion that comes with trying to truly understand who you are,” Spencer said. Drawing and creating is Spencer’s outlet to express herself. Everything she makes comes from a real place in her heart.
“It helps me connect with my emotions, it’s an outlet for whatever feelings I’m holding on to,” Spencer said. That’s one of the most captivating things about what art can do. It’s a space to work through feelings.
It never has to be perfect. One of Spencer’s favorite aspects of creating is the freedom to make mistakes. “I enjoy allowing myself room to make errors,” Spencer said. “It’s nice to know that I’m able to mess up and still have a piece that I can say I created.” It’s a reminder that humans do make mistakes. It’s part of life, but learning from them and improving can be fulfilling.
Painting is one of the oldest forms of art. It’s been done for probably millions of years, as far back as pre-historic times depicting their lives on the walls of caves. It’s changed forms over the centuries, new styles are created by people in different places on the planet at different times. But the thing they all have in common is the desire to share a snapshot of the world as they view it. So much time and patience is required to create something so detailed and expressive.
Chris Grimstad, a recording arts major, is talented in many different forms of art, but their paintings are undeniably special. In their high school painting class, an assignment was to create someone with big hair, but it seemed a little boring to them. Their thought process was bigger than that.
“I’m going to make her a queen, I’m going to give her a crown. I can do something about power,” Grimstad said. The painting is sectioned off with different symbols to represent something that holds power over people in society.
“One side represents money and capitalism, which is why we have the money and little factories,” they said. “One part is about drugs, obviously. The top part is about heterosexuality and the patriarchy, I feel that holds a lot of power in our society.” Creating is a major part of Grimstad’s life.
“Anything that you create, it has to be unique,” Grimstad said. “It involves craft, but it also involves doing something new.” Art is like a cycle in the way it shares information. The artist feels something and portrays it in some form, and then the viewer receives that and interprets how it relates to them. But it’s becoming common lately that people don’t care about the process or quality, they just want a cheap and easy substitute that AI can provide.
Grimstad loves sharing their art and will sell at markets and allow people to commission something from them. But some people are shocked to find out that a hand-painted sticker will cost $3. It’s hard to sell when people don’t respect the time and resources artists put into any piece.
“If they were to commission an actual artist, it would have so much more emotion,” Grimstad said. “As an artist, there’s so many times you have an unexpected idea or something that changes your process. It could even be a mistake that you made, and it changes your process completely and gives you a new idea.” Art is meant to be shared and celebrated. There should be some feeling you get from viewing an artwork. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. “Engaging with art is one of the things that we do that’s not just profit, it’s to connect with the world,” they said.
Art can bring everyone together. Humans love expressing themselves and experiencing new things. There are so many different perspectives on creating something meaningful. Each medium takes its amount of skill and dedication to take people where the artist wants them to go. All art is human expression, and nothing can ever replace or recreate the feeling of seeing something that took countless hours, over years of experience, in such a refined way.
