Reagan Linde is a senior from Billings, Montana studying art and politics. She is planning to pursue a Master’s in counseling and hopes to open a private practice.
When did your artistic journey begin?
My earliest childhood memory was when I was fingerpainting and my mom gave me blue paints to go in the backyard and paint. I came in covered in blue paint and I remember her yelling at me as I ran around the house covered in paint.
But I definitely embraced art and creativity from the time I was little. Then when I got into high school I got into painting. I thought I was going to be a wedding dress designer so I’d draw and paint dresses, but then I realized it was silly to be a fashion designer from Montana.
Have the things you draw evolved?
It’s definitely evolved. A lot of the early stuff was dresses and clothes and now I pretty much exclusively do landscapes. A lot of landscape stuff came at the end of high school when I realized I was going to leave Montana. And when I got to college and got homesick, I would paint landscapes.
Are all your landscapes of Montana?
I try to branch out. Most of my favorite ones are Montana but I’ve been doing other places that are important to me. Last semester I did a lot of the Appalachian Trail and some from my trips this summer to Utah and Arizona. But it’s a very different color palette. All the stuff in Montana is very much like blues and greens and purples, while Utah is more oranges and pinks.
How’d you get into sculpting?
During my sophomore year I took it on a whim and absolutely fell in love with it. It’s my favorite medium. It was the class that convinced me to be an art major. As I got into sculpture, I realized art has so much more to offer than just being a destresser. It has so much to say about how we understand ourselves in the world, how we understand our relationship with God.
What has studying art done for you outside of bettering your craft?
Studying art has deepened my faith in ways that I could have never imagined. It has taught me more about who I am and who people are, what beauty is and why it’s important. We get to see the creative nature of God, which is something we don’t usually reflect on as academics.
Do you think Hillsdale should focus more on art?
Yes. It’s literally in our tagline: the good, the true, and the beautiful. We study the good and true all the time and we hit a little bit of the beautiful like in English classes but it’s not emphasized as much as I think it should be. The beautiful has so much to say. It’s the first thing that leads us to the good and the true. When we recognize that things are beautiful it usually suggests an underlying structure and perfection to it.
What role will art play in your future, especially in your goal to own a private counseling practice?
Someday I could become a professional artist and I would really enjoy that. But in terms of counseling, I think art has done a lot to show me the importance of empathy. The only thing you need to be good at art is empathy. Painting and art is all about relationships, like how things are interacting with one another. Like creating balance and symmetry, it’s all in relationships and in order to understand them and convey them, you have to have empathy. And in counseling, that’s all it is. Counseling is about trying to understand relationships between people and you need empathy for that.
Do you have specific music you listen to while making art?
I have very specific songs I associate with whatever piece I was working on at the time. I listen to Kanye West all the time when I sculpt. That is almost exclusively what I listen to. It puts me in the right headspace to sculpt, which is fascinating. You think it would be classical music. He has been my top artist on Spotify for the last three years purely because of sculpting.