While the coronavirus has challenged the world in many different ways, it hasn’t kept the students and staff at Spokane Falls Community College from letting their creative sides shine. 

From aspiring artists to emerging musicians, the coronavirus closures and enduring quarantine have marked an unprecedented time for them to practice their passions remotely. 

“Since all my classes are art classes, one of them is an experimental drawing class, we’re always doing new stuff,” said freshman Devon Martinez, who’s pursuing her associate’s degree in Fine Arts. “If anything, it’s keeping me going.”

Martinez and her creative mediums, from collages to crafts and pastels, are a representative of just a few of the many artistic outlets that have sustained students and their imaginations through isolation.  

“I do feel like I’m kind of just trying to figure it out on my own in a way, but it’s definitely made me experiment more in terms of what I have available to me here at home,” Martinez said. 

The quarantine has also enabled artists to pursue their own projects without being restrained by outside responsibilities, like in the case of freshman Zachary Hartman, who’s studying for his Audio Engineering certificate. 

“I’ve been working on a potential solo album for the longest time, but during quarantine I’ve had the time to actually sit down and work on stuff because we have so much more free time now,” said Hartman, who released his latest single, “Losing Dimensions,” in February. 

Still, that doesn’t mean the abundance of time indoors hasn’t come with its own challenges to the creative process. 

“Usually, I would go outside and experience things or smells or sounds that would be like, ‘That makes me feel a feeling, I want to make a song about that.’ But there’s no more of that since I’ve been locked in my house, so it takes much longer to actually come up with ideas for anything,” Hartman said. 

For some, those new challenges and restrictions are at the core of what making art is all about – communicating ideas and concepts by overcoming those same difficulties. 

“In terms of how artists work, I think the opportunity is there for you to explore a different way of working and that’s part of the artistic process,” said Rob McKirdie, who has been teaching sculpture and drawing classes at SFCC for the past five years.

“That’s really what artists do, is solve those types of problems whether they’re self-imposed or imposed by a quarantine.”

For McKirdie, who remains a practicing artist, those same elements of problem-solving and unrestricted freedom have led to new developments in his own work, too.  

“I’ve been making drawings more than I have been making sculptures, which is a different thing for me,” said McKirdie, whose work was recently featured in Gallery 110’s “Paper Mill” exhibition and the North Dakota Museum of Art’s “Art in Isolation” gallery.

But he hasn’t been the only one to grow to the new methods of quarantine creativity. The recent work from his students, and those seen on the Spokane Falls Community College Fine Art Facebook group, have been testaments to that same artistic spark.

“Those people that have found the way to modify or change their practice to incorporate the fact that they can’t leave their house or can’t be involved with other people, you’re seeing things that are different or new,” McKirdie said.