Karin Stevens | Staff Writer

From man’s earliest beginnings, art has been a common language spoken across every culture. In fact, some long-dead cultures have left little but their art behind to tell us their stories. The artist looks to the wall of a cave and sees a canvas, a piece of marble is transformed into a goddess, a ceiling becomes a vision of heaven. The need and ability to create art makes us unique in the
animal kingdom—distinctly human. Today’s artists can find creative support and training in their disciplines through mentors and schools. Our own City College Art Department has been helping fledgling artists to build strong foundations to mount their works since 1925. Featured here are some of the artists being molded by Sacramento City College to create art’s future.

Aimee Phelps. || Photos by Atom Church

Is a person born with the heart of an artist, or is a sense of art developed through the inspiration of life’s experiences? For Amy Phelps, the answer to that question may be both.

Phelps was raised in a family where art is in the blood. She grew up surrounded by artistic expression. As an adult, Phelps made a living painting houses not canvases—until the lower, left side of her body was paralyzed for six months due to a back injury. “You lift five-gallon paint buckets for seven years, it takes a toll on your body,” says Phelps. She knew it was time to take her paintbrushes in a different direction, and the injured painter says she returned to school to pursue an art degree.

The artist, now 38, has been with the City College art program for about a year now, where she continues to work toward a full recovery. She says her art “is very therapeutic … some place for me to go and express anything that comes to mind.” Online classes were a great help to her when her injury made on campus classes a challenge.

Though being an artist was clearly in the stars for Phelps, when she put acrylic to canvas in autumn of 2009, to paint “Surrender”, it was inspired by a

"Surrender" by Aimee Phelps was inspired by an incident where she came to the aid of several shooting victims.

devastating experience that began years earlier.

On that day so long ago, where others may have fled, Phelps ran into a building to come to the aid of several shooting victims. She is hesitant to speak about the details of the tragic event, but the memory lingers. “I asked for a real photo of one of the boys,” Phelps says upon meeting the parents of a victim she’d cradled in her arms, who later died of his injuries. “So I could see him … Not the way I remembered him.”

Last year, Phelps met one of the survivors. It was the first time they had seen each other since that ill-fated day. “He came up to me and said, ‘You were there … you were the angel that came in and saved me.’” She sighs and has to pause for a moment. “That’s why I came back and painted this,” she explains, referring to “Surrender”—an angel with only subtle hints at facial features, done in black, white and grey acrylics. For the artist, the lack of color and face embodies her uneasiness at being seen in such a heroic light. “It could have been anybody that was the angel,” she says. “I was his angel, and I don’t really see myself as that.”

Straton hard at work in his studio.

Imposing in stature, but unassuming and mild in nature, Travis Stratton stands beside one of his framed, charcoal drawings. It hangs in the spare bedroom of his apartment that has become a studio for his work. “This is the first real drawing that I did in my elementary drawing class that made me decide that I could actually do this, that maybe I have some talent,” says Travis Stratton. The sketch depicts a man stooping to speak to a child on an ocean shore.

Stratton did a lot of art as a teenager, but was told he couldn’t make a living at it, so he left it behind. A recent upheaval brought him back. The artist, now 30, was living with his wife, Julie, in the island paradise of Hawaii. The couple made their living in real estate, she as a Realtor and he as a home inspector. When the bottom fell out of the market, both businesses were in trouble. “We were in a predicament,” says Julie shaking her head, “and Hawaii isn’t a place to be when
you’re struggling.”

Before long, the Strattons found it necessary to return to their Sacramento roots. Julie began working for the State, and Travis returned to school to study computers. “I went back to [City College] to get a degree and a new career path, something I could do to support my family,” he shrugs.

Then, as fate would have it, on a family visit, Travis’s father showed Julie a drawing that Travis had done in high school. “It was just amazing. It was intricate and detailed … it was a side of him that I didn’t even know,” Julie says, pulling both hands to her heart. She encouraged him to take an art class along with his computer studies. That drawing class altered his path. By the end of the semester he had changed his major to Studio Art. “I have so much more passion for this than I would have doing anything else,” he says through a grin.

In one of his paintings, “Can You Hear Me Now?” Stratton once again works with charcoals. “It’s almost like working with clay,” he explains. “You get so much value and depth. It’s pretty remarkable.”

Siena Kendall.

Inside her Bohemian apartment, 20-year-old artist Siena Kendall sits cross-legged on the living room floor. Overlapping paintings and charcoal sketches encircle her.

Until recently, Kendall’s artistic talents had been primarily focused on pencil drawings, as evidenced by the numerous filled sketch books that are stacked nearby. She bends her head over
one of the oil paintings, revealing girlish plastic barrettes nestled in a tousle of short black curls. Her current enrollment in Acrylic Painting with City College Professor Kathy Noonan has inspired
her to spend more time painting.

“This is my first time getting into paint. I’m really excited because I like how you can go over it so many times and how long it takes for a painting to develop. You have a whole span of time to it—and layers over layers,” Kendall says while dragging a contemplative finger across the painted lines that form a teacup.

"Old Man" by Siena Kendall.

She credits her primary education for her ability to have created such a large collection of work. “I was lucky enough to go to a Waldorf school, where we had art every day, every year, in different forms.”

Kendall remarks that her family has also been a huge influence on her growth as an artist. Paintings depicting scenes of South American life hang on one wall of the room, painted by the young artist’s maternal grandmother, an Uruguayan immigrant. Her mother, Kendall explains, instilled her with a sense of social responsibility. “She got me into the more social aspect of art, to kind of spread a message. Like in my ‘Old Man,’” she says, flipping through the pages of a sketch book to find the pencil drawing. “You see a homeless person, but they’re never looking you in the
face. They’re just presenting their suffering—their tattered clothes.”

Dipping a narrow brush into deep blue acrylic, Derreck Jackson extends a tattooed arm to shade beneath Louis Armstrong’s lower lip in a nearly finished portrait. Beside his artist’s desk is a painting of soulful singer Erykah Badu, created using spray paint, stencils and acrylics. Both pieces are part of a series of 12 musicians Jackson is painting for an August show at Level Up in Downtown Sacramento.

The 26-year-old artist sits in his makeshift studio that takes up one end of his living room and contemplates the duality of being an artist. Rubbing one hand across the top of his shaved head, he speaks of trying to find a balance between art for the sake of art and art he is able to sell—while dealing with the reality that art supplies cost money.

Jackson puts the finishing touches on his latest portrait.

The musician series is comprised of pieces he creates for survival. To satisfy his own artistic passions, Jackson paints military scenes. This interest developed from artwork and pictures he was exposed to as a child. “I used to have this Vietnam encyclopedia; it was like a bible of every photo from Vietnam,” he explains while looking at one of his earliest paintings. The canvas, which hangs above his couch, is a vivid scene of soldiers in a desolate landscape, running for a Huey helicopter.

For now, necessity dictates Jackson’s direction. The musician portraits will go up for sale and will help to fund a move out of Sacramento. This will be the artist’s final semester at City College before transferring to a university in the fall. He’s hoping for Long Beach State. There, he will continue to study history and art, hoping that in the future he’ll be able to teach.

Wherever he finds himself, art will be a part of his life. “I’ve always wanted to draw,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to paint. It’s something inside of me.”