Art student Karleigh Perez splashes color on campus

By Donte Medder |Staff Writer|

Senior Karleigh Perez, has used art as a gateway to express her creative mind into the real world.

Her journey here at CSUSB has helped refine her skills in surrealist paintings as well as introduced her to several different forms of art, which she hopes has prepared her for her career.

For Perez, art has been a part of her life before she can even remember. Her early exposure to art grew to a passion in her early years with the inspiration from her family.

“My grandpa was an artist, and he would always show me [his artwork] and I would just sit there and draw with him,” explained Perez.

When she was younger, other children would come to her to draw things for them and that’s when she realized this was what she was meant to do.

Perez’ skills focus on the genre of surrealism, the blurring of lines between conditions in dreams and reality.

Her favorite art form surrealism was a cultural movement that began in the 1920’s. The artistic style was made popular by various artists like, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst.

What drew Perez to surrealism was artists like Tim Burton and Dali, who are her biggest inspirations.

“I really love the concept of taking reality and distorting it with my imagination,” said Perez.

“Something about my artwork tends to be magical or haunting, which is probably the result of my weirdness,” she added with a laugh.

Perez chose CSUSB because of its close proximity to home and her admiration for the art program.

“This school has the best art program out of all the other Cal States that I researched,” she explained.

Perez described her four years spent at CSUSB as great experience that has taught her many different art forms.

She said, “Not only have I grown as an artist in painting and illustrations, but I have had the chance to work in glass blowing, ceramics, instillation art and soon photography too.”

Perez was recently offered the opportunity to paint a mural in Pfau Library’s Cafe au Lib over summer break, which took her nearly three weeks to complete.

The library cafe had been looking for something to take the space of the vacant wall and asked Perez to submit a few sketches to be painted as a mural.

The colorful mural features various campus-related objects and quotes, floating around our campus mascot and a mug of coffee.

“I was given suggestions as to what type of mural they were looking for and when I submitted my sketches, they loved this one!”

Perez said, “I try to paint as much as I can but it’s hard to lug canvases and paints everywhere, so I am constantly drawing in my sketch books.”

“I’ll hopefully start looking at jobs in Los Angeles or the beach area, because they’re really good locations for selling art.”

She plans on breaking into illustration in the movie industry after graduation.

“The art world is super competitive, so I would like to say I want to get an opportunity with Disney or Pixar,” said Perez.

“Any creative department or art department within a major clothing company like Volcom or Billabong would be good too.”

Perez said she has learned a lot over the years and as her CSUSB experience draws to an end, no pun intended, her creativity continues to grow everyday.