Long before her time at the Claremont Colleges, Sabina Eastman PZ ’23 knew she wanted to be an artist; before she was even born, a psychic told her grandmother — an artist herself — that her granddaughter would be an artist. Her grandmother nurtured Sabina’s passion and taught Eastman the technical styles of drawing around the age of nine.
A double major in Art History and Studio Art, Eastman’s philosophy is all about combining various art movements and integrating them into her own personal style. Her main media of choice is printmaking, something she experimented with for a while in various 5C art classes. Part of her process includes analyzing exhibition styles and art movements and integrating them into her own artistic practices.
“There’s a lot of studio classes that have ‘experimental’ in the title or in the syllabus, and that’s something I’ve always found super helpful, because you’re just given a wide range of media to work with, and there aren’t strict parameters.”
She has found that the Studio Art departments across the 5Cs allow her to explore more chemical processes of printmaking. She often etches her designs into copper and likes to use any sort of artistic alchemy to create her art. Her art uses a variety of printmaking techniques to create portraiture of various women, often inspired by prominent figures in her life. She also uses charcoal and acrylic paint to portray feminine experience.
“There’s a lot of studio classes that have ‘experimental’ in the title or in the syllabus, and that’s something I’ve always found super helpful, because you’re just given a wide range of media to work with, and there aren’t strict parameters,” Eastman said.
She became well-acquainted with the process of printmaking through these classes and her professors, who were able to dedicate their time to teaching more unfamiliar techniques.
“You really need to know the process in order for your ideas to come through in the media,” Eastman said.
Her art style is largely inspired by the strong feminine presences in her life, and her art aims to capture these positive influences that have encouraged her creative spirit.
“I try to portray different emotions or different experiences through a portrait of somebody else that maybe I can see myself in,” she said.
Eastman is inspired by the idea of other people acting as mirrors into each other, which shines through in her artistic ethos. She is also very deliberate in the way that she relates the concepts of her art to the medium with which she is working.
“I think my art is very specific to the material that I’m using, and the historical background of that material, which is always really interesting to see how other people interpret it,” Eastman said.
She allows the parameters of the medium she works within to shape what concepts she brings to life. By exploring the depth of the medium she uses, she is able to gain a fuller understanding of this history behind the process itself.
Her focal point within the intersection of Art History and Studio Art is the way of arranging her art in the context of an exhibition. She sees the subtle power of having creative freedom in the curatorial process as a way to communicate subconscious meaning.
“Getting to choose the contexts that these works exist in is a really great opportunity that not many artists get outside of their thesis,” Eastman said. “And it’s something that really interests me, just how presenting certain artworks and those presentation methods communicate different meanings or can just help to contextualize those works.”
Another aspect of her artistic expression is being a part of creating a creative community within the 5Cs called Catalyst Collective. She asserts that there is immense importance in finding a space away from the intensity of academia to create and collaborate.
“Having a club like that is just such a great outlet because you’re not confined to any certain artistic experience or method,” Eastman said.
Her outlook on creating art always starts with an eye — reflecting her larger focus on detail and attention paid to seeing the bigger picture.
“Most of my portraits aren’t based off of anyone real,” Eastman said. “But they all end up looking like me.”