Displaying the creativity of Big Bend students

MOSES LAKE – Henry David Thoreau said: ‘The world is but a canvas to our imagination.’ For Big Bend Community College students and staff, they only need to find their way to the Paul Hirai Fine Arts Building to see a glimpse into the canvas of BBCC students’ imaginations.

Art Instructor Dustin Regul has a rotating display of student art in the lobby of the Paul Hirai Fine Arts Building (1900 Building). He said that at the completion of each project, student work is displayed and rotates out when the next project is completed by students. This means that on a week to week basis, the lobby can look very different. Especially since each class has a different schedule for when projects will be completed and each quarter has different art classes available.

Regul said he enjoys seeing what every student comes up with because they have very different ways they view the world and artistic skill level going into his classes.

While he said he knows it isn’t realistic for every student to get an art degree, there is one thing that every student can learn.

“The thing that every student can take away is learning creativity,” said Regul. “When you think of creativity you think of art; creativity is idea-generation and idea-generation is necessary in just about all fields.”

Regul has two goals for the BBCC Art Department. The first is to have a consistent flow of art majors come through Big Bend. The second is to have enough consistent enrollment to add another on campus full-time art instructor so the types of art classes provided can be expanded.

“There’s so many classes that I want to do but I’m the only full-time person,” he said.

His favorite project he has students do is in his ceramics classes is called ‘caboodle’. He explained that he gives his classes the stipulation that they need to create a sculpture of a various requirements such as a certain number of shapes and certain amount of dead space but it has to be abstract.

“It’s amazing how vastly different every single sculpture looks,” Regul said.

Regul said he used to allow the project to be abstract or representational but found it limited some student’s creativity, so he changed the project to be abstract only.

“Once I switched that project to abstract only, it quickly became my favorite project,” he said.

The fine arts building is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday for those who want to take a look at the current displays of art.