So You Always Wanted To Be An Art Major?

Reyna Saenz said she switched her major because she knew she was meant to teach creativity to others.

Saenz, a senior visual studies major with an emphasis on art education, said she was a physical therapist major when she first arrived at Tech.

“Right before I switched to art education,” Saenz said, “my mom, she asked me ‘Is this what you really want to do?’ because I’m good in anatomy, physiology, biology and stuff like that.”

“She thought, ‘Are you going to be truly happy?’ because all of my family are artists and I’ve always been drawing and coloring as a kid.”

Saenz said her mother suggested she should be an art teacher because Saenz liked teaching children art.

Saenz, from Denver City, Texas, said her mother approved of her decision and her father was pleased either way.

Art majors Reyna Saenz and Darren Matsler

“Well, my mom thought it was great.” Saenz said, My dad said ‘hey, whatever makes you happy’, so he was just like ‘whatever, you’re going to college’ but my mom says ‘it was a great decision for you’ that’s about it.”

Saenz is an example of students who transfer from different majors to the School of Art.

The fall 2013 undergraduate enrollment for the School of Art was 326 students, which included 23 new undergraduate student transfers, according to the Texas Tech University Fact Book. This compares to five students who transferred out of the School in the 2013 academic year, according to School officials.

Ryan Scheckel, academic advisor for the school, said students transferring to the school from majors such as physical therapy are in familiar territory.

“When somebody is thinking physical therapy,” Scheckel said, “they are typically thinking they want to work with people and an art educator, that’s what visual studies is, wants to work with people.”

Scheckel said architecture students who transfer into the school are commonplace because many of them are already skilled at drawing.

“For someone who draws well,” Scheckel said, “drawing is not a career but architecture, or architect, is.”

Darren Matsler, a junior communication design major from Lubbock, said he was originally a dual major in architecture and civil engineering.

“I still love civil engineering,” Matsler said. “I still wouldn’t mind being a civil engineer but architecture just wasn’t up my alley and I was more drawn to the artistic aspect as opposed to the technical aspect of architecture, so I switched.”

Matsler, also Saenz’s boyfriend, said he had a realization these majors were not for him.

“It was probably in November,” Matsler said, “about halfway through November until the end of November and then I started talking to the architecture advisers and it was the spring semester when I actually decided to switch majors.”

Matsler said, with a chuckle, his mother hated his decision.

“She was worried that I was going to become the typical starving artist,” Matsler said. “She was worried that I was going to not end up with a good job or I wasn’t going to be making enough money or anything.”

Yet, Matsler said his mother came around to accepting his decision.

“After a semester or two,” Matsler said, “and I actually thoroughly explained what I was going to be doing, she understood and she was happy that I actually decided to do something I want to do as opposed to do something to make money.”

Matthew Faulkner, a sophomore fine arts major with a degree in design communication, said he transferred from South Plains College in spring 2014.

Faulkner said watching Disney animated films inspired him to become an artist.

“Something about the way it was done kind of drew my attention,” Faulkner said, “and from there, other cartoons kind of got into my mindset and I started getting into about how the process was done and just how creative this looked.”

Faulkner, from Levelland, Texas, said his biggest inspiration comes from various styles of artwork he has seen.

“You have the Disney sort of soft feeling,” Faulkner said, “but very clean looking fantasy style that it just is so attractive to children and then there’s this anime style — it’s new and it’s got this flashy background, a lot of stuff’s going on.”

“It’s something that I hadn’t seen before,” Faulkner said.

“It wasn’t just the plot,” Faulkner said. “It was the way the design was done and that I think is what got me started the most, was trying to replicate that.”

Faulkner said he would start off by watching these cartoons with a piece of paper in front of him, which he recorded on videotape, and would pause whatever he was watching and would try to draw them from hours on end.

“No artist ever gets anything right the first time,” Faulkner said, “if they did they’d be a master at this or at least they’d be a prodigy on the matter.”

“So it takes tons of practice,” Faulkner said, “and that’s the first thing I would do as soon as I was able to pick up a pencil and paper, I was practicing on an hourly basis to the point where I actually kind of ignored my parents because I really didn’t do much of anything else.”

Faulkner said he learned that there was a method to drawing by finding books on how to draw.

“To this day,” Faulkner said, “I can actually go into a bookstore and one of the first places I’ll go to is the art section for manga comic books, how to draw, and I would spend hours in there just pouring over these books absorbing what I can out of it.”

According to “Understanding Manga and Anime,” manga, which was coined by Japanese artist Hokusai Katsuhika, means whimsical pictures and sketches that often contain fantasy elements.

Faulkner said his parents were somewhat supportive of his choice of major.

“It’s kind of a yes and no,” Faulkner said, “because my parents were always of this idea of ‘you can grow up to be anything you want but we want you to make a lot of money on it.’”

Faulkner said there is no such thing as bad art.

“The way I look at it is,” Faulkner said, “art is an expression, whether it be music, food, poetry or visual arts.”

Matthew Faulkner’s Art: Falokar.deviantart.com