Marisa Sergovia is a third-year printmaking student with a passion for art education and studio arts. She hopes to one day teach art and encourage students to pursue anything that makes them happy.

Q: Who are you?

A: I think I’m a human, this is the start of my third year here as a transfer student. I’m a studio arts and art education double-major and (an) art history minor. I’m emphasizing in printmaking and trying to do glass blowing as well and merge together.

Q: When did you start making art?

A: The earliest I can remember is kindergarten, doing a s***-ton of drawing. My mom got me the big ol’ box of crayons with the sharpener. And honestly, since then there has never been another thought in my mind but ‘I’m going to be an artist,’ and that’s it. I don’t know why there was never a second backup plan but hey… I didn’t research this school, I just came once and I was like, ‘ooh trees,’ and I realized the art department is really strong here and printmaking is really prominent here and we are one of three CSUs who counts glassblowing toward your major. So my first semester here somehow I took intro to printmaking and intro to glass and from there just went off, just fell in love.

Q: What inspires you?

A: This feels kinda generic, but literally everything. Anything like my friends, or little things like small rocks on the ground, huge events in my life, emotions, ideas. Anything that sparks my mind. It seems like a lot of people have one prominent thing but I find inspiration from everything, even from you, doing what you want to do, that’s inspiring.

Q: What is your process?

A: (My process) varies because even with glassblowing, you can do like slumping or cold working, you can do hot glass; so it depends what I want to work on. In printmaking, there’s like four ‘main’ techniques like relief, woodcut, lino and then screenprinting is what I usually do, but then there’s etching and lithography which is carving into limestone, so it depends on what technique I’m doing. My teacher would like me to start with my sketchbook for ideas, but usually, I like to do everything in my head and then I honestly work well under pressure when there’s like two days to a deadline. These last four nights I’ve been in school just pulling all-nighters doing my s*** because my teacher comes back tomorrow. My process is pretty varied it depends what I’m creating I guess. I know I want to make s***, I just got into the BFA program so that’s more pressure because they want you to have an unrealistic amount of time along with the other stuff.

Q: When did you take up the teaching side of art?

A: I always kinda wanted to teach, but not really primarily. My junior year of high school I had a teacher who was out there. She was into fairies, believed in weird s***, but she was completely behind us with everything we did. So I realized that teachers can make huge differences. Everyone probably knows how it is like there are teachers that can have s***** qualities about them and then there are good qualities. I want to be the teacher that pushes people to go forward with their life instead of discouraging them with bad grades like I want to see people succeed, so I probably realized when I was in high school.

Q: Plans after graduating?

A: Whenever I do graduate I’ll probably stay here working at the sandwich shop I work at and save money. I want to go to either San Francisco or Oregon because I need a city for the type of stuff that I like. While the art community here is great for artwork, there’s no way I would be able to flourish the way I want to and I need constant inspiration and I’ve taken a lot from Chico in the past three years. I need to go somewhere where there’s s*** everywhere. Some people might be distracted by that but for me, it’s just more inspiration like let’s do it.

Mitchell Krett can be reached at @[email protected] or @theorion_arts on Twitter.