Campus Gallery to Feature California Raven’s Work

How does an artist show you what’s important to her?

She paints it.

Colette Breda is a senior art major from Escondido, Calif. Her art exhibition “Beautiful Moments” was set to be featured from Oct. 28-Nov. 2 in the McCarthy Art Gallery.

Those experiences touch on the three aspects of Benedictine College’s mission that the college hopes can help Transform Culture in America: Community, faith and scholarship.

Community inspired the exhibit, Breda said.

“A really big realization I had coming into college,” she said, is that “things that have happened in my life and people who have impacted me and decisions that my parents have made … all these decisions come colliding into one another and create the moment that’s right now, and it’s not just because of my own life. So that’s why I like capturing other people’s lives as well as just the beauty that’s right before me.”

Faith has been a key to Breda’s experience, also.

“Being at a Catholic school, there will be assignments where we get to pour our faith into our art which I think is super unique and super special,” she said

In her junior year, Breda traveled with a 12 students from Benedictine College to Belize for a mission trip. The students worked at the schools and put on soccer camps in the afternoon. One student even brought Raven soccer jerseys to give to the children. Breda and the group did a lot of maintenance around the small town, painting picnic benches, a woman’s home, and the church. “I would most definitely do this again,” Breda told the school newspaper. “This was an amazing experience.”

But scholarship has been at the heart of her experience.

Breda graduated from Classical Academy High School, an award-winning, tuition-free California public charter high school.

“I have been interested in art before I could even read or write or anything. I think at the age of two was when I had my first drawings that my mom kept. It’s just always been a really big passion, probably my favorite thing to do since I could ever remember. I actually have a massive portfolio of hundreds of art pieces from when I was a kid,” she said.

But when she came to college she first turned to another of her loves.

“I actually was going to major in math,” she said. “I was kind of always intending to because that’s one of my other favorite things. But more and more I realized that art is what I love and what God had given me a talent for, so I wanted to take advantage of it. I guess when I really started taking it seriously then was junior year of college when I changed my major to art.”