"Seriously, before I figured out I wasn’t that great at math, I wanted to be a veterinarian," says De Anza College student Kristina Yuen. "It was my childhood dream."
Until recently, it didn’t cross the mind of this 19-year-old art student that she could pursue art.
"Art was always just sitting there in the background," says Yuen. "I never really considered art as something to do."
Born and raised in the Bay Area, 19-year-old Yuen is finishing her third year at De Anza. She leads the normal life of any woman her age, yet her artwork can hardly be described as normal.
"When I can, I try to relax and hang out with friends," says Yuen. "Many weekends you can probably find me in Santa Cruz on the beach, downtown, and on the UCSC campus with friends."
Yuen began oil painting five years ago, but it wasn’t until last year in a De Anza art class that she discovered she was interested in acrylics.
"I’m also getting better at drawing now that I’m taking an intermediate drawing class," says Yuen.
Although Yuen admits that taking art classes has been improving her artistic flair, she says she was more of a self-taught artist.
"Even when I started taking oil painting classes, I never really had any formal training in art," says Yuen. "I kind of just jumped into it and seemed comfortable enough to do most paintings on my own without the help of the teachers."
Yuen says the oil painting classes she took were a nice introduction to mixing colors and copying what she saw, but not much else.
"Now that I’m taking classes like acrylic painting, design, and drawing, I realize there’s a lot more aspects that go into making an art piece other than just technical ability," says Yuen, who prefers to choose her own subject matter.
It was Yuen’s mother who first suggested she take painting classes.
"I don’t think she ever expected me to actually stay with it, much less major in it," says Yuen. "But she’s really supportive of it."
Six or seven four-year colleges have accepted her into their art programs, including the University of Santa Cruz, the University of California at Davis and San Diego State University.
Despite being admitted to so many institutions, Yuen is far from pretentious. She says she doesn’t think she has developed a style yet, and doesn’t consider most of her artwork complete. For her, everything is a work in progress.
Majoring in art was a recent change in Yuen’s plan. She originally intended to major in animal sciences and used to volunteer at a dog adoption center.
When Yuen decided she didn’t like math, she realized that she’d never really considered art as something to do.
But a sense of curiosity for the arts has been with Yuen since before grammar school.
At a time when she had more fingers than years of life experience, and many children her age had more interest in eating finger paste than creating art, Yuen was developing art skills.
She says she doesn’t remember one specific time in her childhood when she realized she really liked art. Yuen says that her interest may have been sparked in preschool while making craft projects out of popsicle sticks and finger painting.
Her parents put her and her older brother in a lot of different activities, says Yuen.
"I think I really enjoyed the ones that needed creativity, like ceramics," she says. "I never really thought of art as something that was work. It was always just fun for me to experiment with."
Yuen’s art skills have brought her the rewards of teaching children six and older how to paint and the opportunity to have one of her paintings displayed in the Children’s Discovery Museum for a month.
"[The kids] are really fun to work with, because kids can be so creative and so brutally honest, too," says Yuen. "Their creativity and imagination is incredible. Some of the time I couldn’t even figure out what they had made until they told me."
