Three Rivers College is holding its annual Fine Art student exhibition at the Tinnin Center Art Gallery.
The exhibition is being shown until May 13.
This exhibition is free to all public and the gallery doors are open from noon to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. Students at Three Rivers created works of art that are full of inspiration and expressive details, according to organizers.
A few students, Heaven Gaines, Alissa Redding and Kiley Roach, gave the Daily American Republic a look into a deeper understanding of their work.
Heaven Gaines is finishing her first year of the Art Education Transfer Program at TRC. She got into art because of her grandmother, who is a local artist. They painted together while Gaines was growing up.
Gaines also had a very motivating art teacher in high school, who not only inspired Gaines, but also encouraged her to continue with art as a way to express herself.
“I struggle verbally with expressing myself, so art is a great outlet for me to get out what I’m trying to express,” Gaines told the DAR.
Gaines created “Birds of a Feather” using chalk pastel and ink pen on paper as her medium.
“It started out with only the outline of ears, and the more that I worked on it, the more it evolved into something macabre and mysterious,” Gaines said. “This piece also encouraged me to continue working intuitively to create a small series of art pieces.”
Redding is also finishing her first year at TRC and plans to pursue a major as a graphic designer at the next college she attends.
Redding has always loved the idea of creativity that comes with making art.
“The fact that you have complete and total freedom to create anything you want at any time is just an amazing concept for me,” Redding shared with the DAR.
Redding’s piece in the exhibition is “Steam Punk Dream,” which is a mixture of acrylic paint, ink pen and gold leaf on canvas. Redding said it is an expressive and experimental piece that she has made this semester at TRC and by far her favorite creation.
Kiley Roach is finishing her second year at TRC and is majoring in art. She enjoys all mediums of art, but digital art is her favorite. Roach has always been inspired by her father, who was always into art growing up. She said, “I would look through his old sketchbooks that he had created when he was younger and it really inspired me to follow that same path.”
Roach is very serious about her art and wants to use art to make a difference and impact people’s lives through her creations. One of Roach’s pieces is “Self-Portrait,” created with crayons.
“I challenged myself to use crayon on black paper, as well as not using the skin tone crayon because I wanted to build up color (that) created an image of myself,” Roach said.
Roach and Redding also collaborated with another student, Grace Laxton, to create “The Secret of the Pharaoh,” using acrylic, jewels and gold leaf on canvas.
This piece denotes the Egyptian god of wisdom, writing, mathematics and the moon, Thoth. This piece is also an interactive piece for the people. The hieroglyphics in the background contain a code that the viewers are invited to reveal. The three students said they had a lot of fun creating this piece and even stated the hieroglyphics took a lot of thinking and planning to execute.