close personal friends: Alicia on Art

Sup blog. I'm a bit drained from my first month of intense teacher trainings, so I figured I would do something else to acquiesce to my journalistic desires. I decided to interview one of my best friends Alicia, who is an incredibly talented artist, and all around genuinely interesting person, about art, education, and design. Here is our conversation:

LR: Hi Alicia, it’s me, Laney. Thanks so much for letting me pester you with a few questions about your latest art piece. I have been so privileged to watch your art grow through the years, and explore themes of childhood, home, and love. If someone is new to the whole Alicia thing you have going on, how would you describe your art, or your artistic approach?

AS: Hi Laney, thanks for asking. I love that you said ‘explore themes of childhood home and love’ because it's just absolutely true– home and love especially. But my art comes from my childhood, which was so beautiful. To always have crayons, or oil pastels, or acrylic paint or whatever I wanted within reach. I had amazing people, like two professional artist grandparents, and a professional graphic designer/MFA-trained painter aunt. My mom was a phenomenal sketcher, she used to cut silhouettes, and was brilliant with calligraphy. It was great that I had experts in every room I wanted, and materials anytime. So as a child, my artistic approach was ‘make anything, anytime that I feel like’, and [then] I grew into high school, and fell into traps of what I thought I wanted to post on social media, and what I saw on Pinterest. Social media was on the rise when I was 14 and 15 in 2016, and 2017, and so much of my energy was put into ‘Will this get likes? Will this make me money?’. And then I got to college, and you start shaking some of that off, but I didn't really understand art-making for a long time. I was still doing it for a grade, or for my friends to say ‘Wow that's really cute!’, and then I took a class with Adrian Gonzalez who's a printmaking professor –who's leaving UF now which is so sad for them– but he was brilliant, and he really pushed me to question ‘Why do I use collage in my work? Why is my work so imbued with narrative? What do I want to be doing and why am I using these materials and formatting it in this way, to say this thing?’ And it was amazing. 

Recent collage by Alicia, 2026

For our final assignment for that [printmaking] class, he said it could just be one percent printmaking and the rest could be anything else. I made this giant curtain, and it had some printmaking, and it had image transfers, embroidery, sewing, fabric work, braiding, and all kinds of really interesting stuff– and I had to think about, ‘Why does this color mean this? Why do I want to use it to mean this, and why does this shape mean this, and why do I want to use it to mean this, and why does it matter that I'm using ink— which is permanent.’ Everything had to be considered.

(Alicia's final project from afforementioned printmaking class)

So my artistic approach now is quite considerate, and I've now gone back and thought about the artists I enjoy. Instead of blindly clicking on Pinterest or buying [random] art books, I think much more intentionally. I am recently getting into buying books on the practice of art and the basics of painting and using ink and graphic design. I think those things matter so much, because even having gone through art school, a lot of what I want to do is just like ‘Well, I know enough and I can do it’, but I think there is really a lot to be said about learning the basics before you go out. It matters so much, and makes you better and better and better, and learning is fun and good! And throughout undergrad, I wanted to shake that off in exchange for getting coffee with my friends, I didn't learn as much as I should have.

And so now I think my art is quite jaunty. I think it is quite fun and often cartoonish. I think there's a sketchbook-y, lyrical quality to a lot of my work. There's a lot of movement and narrative in what I create—a lot of it isn't figurative or still life. I don't like to draw or paint people so often— I think I can sometimes, and if I want to make a work for a specific person, or if I want to just create a portrait of that person, especially when I do little cartoon work it's gonna be figurative. But I [find myself] veering away from it, I like to put other meanings into my work. But it's still very collage based, and it's still pointing towards a meaning that is specific to me. My approach has changed so much to being so much more informed and specific, rather than broad and jabbing at any meaning, and trying to convey that in whatever figures and icons I think will be most relatable to everybody. So it's become much more personal and about my thoughts and what matters to me.

(Alicia's sketchbook, 2024)

LR: You studied art in undergrad, and recently completed a masters degree in Student Personnel in Higher Education. How has your experience working on the other side of the student experience affected your views on art education?

AS: Gosh, it's influenced and affected everything about my views on art ed. My undergrad was a BA in art, just plain old art. And then I had a certificate in art education, and was one class away from a certificate in ceramics, and I also had an art history minor– so I did a lot in undergrad in all different spaces. I couldn’t possibly imagine I learned as much as I had the time and space for just art or art history or art education, which are all so vastly different. My masters is Student Personnel in Higher Education, but essentially is higher education administration. It's really interesting having done art ed, and has affected a lot of my views on art education because as a student, you go through it, and again, so much of what we do as students is for the grade and for the validation, and for impressing our friends. I think there's a lot of competition that people feel as students, and then you flip it, and suddenly you're learning how to administer it. Still, it informed so much of my art, because suddenly I had the adult perspective, and I thought ‘Oh my God we do a lot of it wrong.’ 

I think it's in a lot of professors and educators, who also just want their students to get the passing grade and move on, and there's not so much care or time put into getting students to buy into what they're doing. What I learned from teaching the First Year Seminar during my first year is that I didn't have as much background on it. I knew what I wanted our students to be able to teach, but I didn't really know why it mattered, or how to get them to care about why it mattered, which would improve their teaching. And between my first and second year I interned at the best university and program (University of South Carolina, University 101 Programs) in the country for the first year experience. They founded it, they created it, and I got to do all this research and learn about where it came from and why it mattered. The next year, when I taught FYF instructors how to actually teach First Year Florida, I got to do an entire lesson on the history of the first year seminar, and what it was and why it mattered and why students teaching it matters. I had so many of them say ‘Wow you know I was excited about this before but now I feel like I'm a part of this beautiful history’. And maybe they don't say it so eloquently, but they would express that they feel so much more excited to teach something that they care about. Just teaching about why you like the thing you like and how it matters is so important. 

LR: How should we arts-educate?

AS: I think people should practice art and craft in whatever way they see fit, but I do think there should be a broader acceptance that not everybody who makes art is an “artist”, and that a practice does have to be developed, and basics must be learned to be, in my eyes, a true professional artist. I think you can be a professional crafts person or a professional creator without claiming the title of being somebody with a legitimate artistic practice and background.

I think there are a lot of issues [brought on by] social media. There are a lot of issues with being able to ‘AI things’ now, but even prior to that, issues of stealing designs via Pinterest or via billboards and magazines, trends remain of not giving credit or acknowledging one’s influences, [there is] a lack of understanding of why you're making what you're making, and then the ease of creating design work [with] Canva or Photoshop. 

So I think people can practice art however they want to, but I think that a lot of people practice art for profit, or marketing, and I don't think that counts in the same way. I actually don't believe that graphic design is an artistic practice at all– it's a design practice, and I think that they're different. So in our arts-educating, I think that there can be more of an emphasis on art making and process, and what it means to understand oil paint vs. acrylic paint, pastels vs. crayons. I think that we should really nerd out more, and I don't think we see as much nerd-out as we could, because we want to be so inclusive. We want to imply that everybody who creates is an artist– and I don't personally think that's true. I'm realizing this probably sounds pretty crappy on paper, but it's what I think and feel.

[I believe] we should arts-educate people to tap into their own personal practice of being any kind of crafty, artsy, or creative person without needing to think of themselves as some legitimate full-fledged artist. I think it would take a lot of the pressure off that you can doodle and create art without having to be some kind of tortured artist, which is a myth anyway.  You can do whatever you want and feel great about it without having to publish, without having to label, without having to sell– you can be just as legitimately creative and artistic as another person who makes art without having to do any of that, and I think art education should talk about that!

LR: How do you differentiate between art and design?

AS: In my mind, the difference really lies in the function of design vs art. Art being a more internal, heady, and creative practice, and not always leading to concrete results. Whereas design is applied to marketing, architecture, and packaging the objects that you use day in and day out. Even the signs displaying different ways to walk around a building is technically design work. Design has a function and use, and art does not necessarily have a use beyond the aesthetic or decorative. Do you know what I mean? I think it's kind of like the difference between [the design of] a single-family home and that of a cathedral. One has a functional purpose and one is imbued with beauty specifically as decoration, not function, that's why it exists the way it does.

Mini Cycle, 2026

Mini lover, 2026

Mini neighborhood, 2026

Many designers are artists, but many designers are not artists. Their design involves [strictly] function. And that's not the same thing, but I think there's a lot of overlap [anyway]. I mean it's a big Venn diagram, and I don't wanna exclude every piece of design from the artistic conversation, and it takes a lot of design to fund [the] arts and get the word about art out there. Design is where so much marketing comes from today, we just wouldn't have [a] platform without design now. Everything needs the right font. Everything needs the right colors. Everything needs the right “look”. There are all these trends that we're gonna have in design right now– we have brands like Cou Cou Intimates, and Graza. These things are largely popular, not necessarily because of the quality, but because of the design. Many of these products aren't even “good” quality for what they are [i.e. a $70 t-shirt that is see through], whether food or clothing, etc., but the design of that product, which is really doing the work, is going to turn that functional object into a sellable object.

Rapid Fire Round!

Song that makes you think about art?

'Foxes in the Snow'- Jason Isbell

Song that makes you think about design as a practice?

'I Want Your Video'- Djo

“Commercial but not trying to be”

A perfume you DONT like?

Anything overly floral and grandma-like. And most Victoria's Secret.

In five words or less, describe your general feelings towards bowling alleys.

Fun and not so difficult

What’s your favorite form of severe/extreme weather?

Severe thunderstorm from inside the Fine Arts building at the University of Florida, or my parents dining room.

Something that inspires you?

Sunlight through the trees, North Florida.

That's all for today! Find more of Alicia's art on Instagram: @aw33ch