Art Becomes Life

By Bethany Waite

Looking through her thick, black framed glasses Katie walks down Mission Avenue in San Francisco. The wind blows her short brown hair into a mess, leaving it in a new fashion. She feels free. She looks toward every corner, finding inspiration at each.

Broken down apartment buildings covered top-to-bottom in graffiti, people walking past, and the bright colors in everyday life. Each of these gives her a reason to let the extraordinary artist that lives inside her shine. It wasn’t always this easy though.

Katie used to live in a world of complete darkness. She lived in total seclusion and isolation from the outside world, or at least in her mind. She drew dark and eerie pictures of deformed creatures, each were pieces straight from her imagination. Before Katie Alberry, who’s now 20, moved to San Francisco she used art to escape from the dull city of Plattsburgh. The city she was forced to grow in.

“There is no doubt that I was depressed,” she said. “And I never really felt that I fit in the way I thought I was supposed to.”

After graduating from Saranac High School in 2007, she moved to California to attend what she refers to as “the academy” majoring in Fine Arts. Very quickly she got settled into the life she was making for herself there. She had been released from the choke-hold Plattsburgh had her in through childhood.

Art has always been her passion and her calling. Painting, drawing, and animation are just some of the arts she’s involved in, along with writing poetry and short stories. Any activity involving creativity, Katie’s imagination can absorb and make original. It comes from her mother, Meg Alberry. She never went to art school or sold her paintings, but she enjoyed making watercolor and charcoal pieces,

“I wasn’t good at it,” Meg admitted. “But I did it anyway.” She finishes the sentence and takes a bite of the Chinese food we ordered. It’s like I’m sitting with a futuristic Katie. Meg loves every part of Katie’s art, believing she’s always been ahead of herself.

“Katie was always ahead of herself, full of wisdom,” she said. “All of her art tells a story.” She tells me about some of Katie’s intricate paintings of monstrous creatures, “They all had statements in them you had to find yourself,” she said.

There was a darkness that lived in her. It was a part of her that she couldn’t seem to get passed while stuck in her small hometown,

“I could relate to that darkness,” Katie said. “And even though I didn’t want it, it was also a part of me. Once I left Plattsburgh I was immersed in a world I felt I belonged to.”

Katie was always more mature than expected at the high school level. She longed to discover new territory and seek out the more diverse cultures in the world. A great influence in her life was Noreen Sadue, her high school art teacher. Sadue had great expectations for Katie’s future.

“She is a unique, caring and sensitive person,” Sadue remarked, in a letter of recommendation. “Perhaps her most obvious strength comes from her maturity, which allows her to feel comfortable expressing her true self at an age where insecurity is more common.”

The expectations Sadue had for Katie came true, but never stopped growing. She expanded. San Francisco opened her to the rest of the world, which she felt she had been missing out on.

She gets off the bus and walks through Yerba Buena Park entering the Samovar Tea Lounge. Relaxed, she takes off her black coat, revealing a thrift shop sweatshirt that matches perfectly with her dark blue jeans.

She orders a caffeinated dark tea, sips the steaming liquid down slowly and breathes fresh air. She was enlightened after moving to San Francisco. A new part of herself was exposed, like a wound. Except this exposure cured her pain. Her paintings are still full of monstrous creatures, evoking raw feelings. But her art is also full of bright colors and expresses her insight and wisdom.

Her life is art. Everyday she’s engulfed and enchanted in the art world while attending a community college in the city. In the fall of 2010, she’ll be attending San Francisco State, taking her art to an even higher level.

Katie Alberry has transformed herself into an aspiring artist. One day, the world will know her name and her motto,

“Welcome to the future…where art becomes life.”