Painting the stress away

As a director for one play with involvement in another, UTRGV junior Sabrina Rodriguez knows what it’s like to juggle classes as a full-time student as well as other outside activities such as church involvement. She painted her stress away along with about 30 other students at Edinburg’s first “Picasso Your Stress” last Tuesday at the Student Union.

The Counseling Center hosted PYS and encouraged students to let go of their anxieties by expressing themselves through art.

Rodriguez began painting her canvas black, then blue because it was her favorite color. Then the colors and ideas kept flowing until she had a colorful canvas with a purple peace sign in the middle.

“I have a lot of things going on in life, so I’m just trying to find my center again,” the theater design major said. “[I’m] trying to get the collaboration of that production and the other production in a time sync with my [classes and church involvement]. The reason I painted this picture is because there’s lightness and there’s dark and in the middle there’s everything in between, but the purple represents Christ. And so, the purple brings us peace within the good and the bad and everything in between.”

UTRGV freshman Elda Peña noticed the canvases lined up and, having not painted for quite some time, took the opportunity to create something more galaxy-like.

“I’ve done like galaxy kind of stuff before, like I did one painting like that for my mother like a long time ago,” the graphic design major said. “I guess I got inspired by that maybe because
I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m just working with what I’ve got.”

While Peña painted for leisure, UTRGV freshman Alex Galindo painted on behalf of financial stress.

“Painting is fun, it gets you away from the stress,” the computer science major said. “To begin with, I had no idea what I was doing, so I went for [a] Rubik’s Cube,but that’s a complete failure. In the end, it’s just kind of throwing something together as it comes to me. It lets me forget about the worldly matters even just for a little bit.”