Losing Herself for All to See
Mech opens herself with the art she creates
Mike Brohard
The place where she escapes opens the door to see Sydney Mech best.
She won’t let anybody in, but the result will come. On a canvas. Where she puts all of her emotions, her feelings, her personality for the world to view in living color.
“Anyone who works in some kind of art, you call it the zone. It’s like basketball,” Mech explained. “When you’re having a great game, you’re not even thinking. When I’m working on my art at school in the studio or at home, I put on some music, and it can be three or four hours can pass and you don’t even know it. I need to remind myself that I need to go eat. I have to get up and walk around. It’s a therapy thing of getting lost in what you’re doing.
“What was so nice, especially in undergrad, the painting studio is open 24 hours. There were some days I’d go in at 11 p.m. It’s quiet, you’re having a bad day, and you can just go do what you do. It’s like the gym. You come in and get up your shots. It’s the same thing.”
Everybody needs a place to go when the world seems overwhelming. For a student-athlete, there are multiple factors which can contribute to the desire to run away and hide. When Mech arrives, the canvas becomes her outlet. The final product may be an expression of her mood, and she does prefer to use bright, happy colors -- very much who the graduate student is to those around the Colorado State women’s basketball team.
But parts of life get to her. The outside world or her own. Her paintings can then become a message, a way to let the populace know exactly where she stands on an issue. Or if she feels she’s being pulled in multiple directions.
It’s cathartic for her, and it all started so simply.
She would watch her mom, Kim, doodle on paper. Or her sister, Clarissa. Before long, she was drawing whatever caught her young fancy. She was very much self-taught, seeking out YouTube videos on how to draw certain characters or subjects.
It started with pencils. Then she’d move on to whatever Clarissa brought home from her high school classes. Charcoal, then watercolors, then simple paints. She started bugging Kim to buy her sketch books, then whatever the newest art set which was on the market.
Somewhere back home, there is still a pile of sketch books with Sydney’s early work. An obvious sign of what was to transpire.
Or not.
“No. I didn’t see it,” Kim said. “Now, she definitely has a creative eye, and it’s been a nice outlet for her. It gives her peace and calm in a hectic world.”
For the younger Sydney, it was just fun. Something to do to pass the time, an activity just like mom and her sister. The Mech’s were an artistic family, as all of the children had to learn to play an instrument. For Sydney, it was the piano.
The one separating trait she had from the group was she was also an athlete. In high school, her play on the court started to draw attention. It was also the place where her intentions with art started to become clearer to her.
“When you take a high school art class, they push you to think more than just drawing. What is the meaning behind it?” Sydney said. “Why did you choose this color? Color theory and things like that, why did you put this here? It challenges the intellectual side of it, and I actually started to love that. Then it got into self-expression, and I really loved that.”
Like most schools, they have fairs where students can put their work on display, and when Cherry Creek did one her junior year, she decided to enter a piece. It was the first time somebody suggested she was living a dual life, at least to outside observers.
Athlete and artist didn’t seem to mix with one member of the faculty, but the comment was one which started her thinking.
“I remember I did an acrylic painting for the first time, and I really liked it. Our library was doing a show, where you enter and maybe win, so I entered,” she said. “I’ll never forget the moment. They found me, because where my name was on the painting was bent, so they wanted me to adjust it and make it flatter. The lady who found me, I was in my weightlifting class, she was like, ‘you’re an athlete and do art, how can you be both people?’ I’ll never forget that moment, because I was, ‘why can’t I?’”
Especially now. When I’m doing my art now, and I’ve gotten better at it and found my style, it’s a lot more fun to take things from my life and feelings and put it into my art.Sydney Mech
Her first year in college was spent at Denver, where she was fully set on pursuing an engineering degree. The allure of art never left her, and realizing it was something which not only made her happy but could also be turned into a degree started to fill her thoughts.
When she transferred, she didn’t just change teams, she changed majors. Again, college art classes opened up another set of doors and ways to express herself.
And like the lady from the library, others are taken back when realize what Sydney can create.
“When I found out she was an art major, I said I want a Ram. It took her a little bit, but she was busy going to class, but she ripped out a Ram for me,” CSU coach Ryun Williams said, pointing to the painting she did for him. “It’s in my office and it is pretty darn good. You can see she is talented, and I visited her classroom one time. Coach (Rico) Burkett and I went over there to see what she was working on. It was a canvas, and oh my, what a gift. What a creative mind. I’m not an artsy guy; to me that’s like absolute brilliance.
“What a neat place to be able to go to and escape whatever.”
Burkett also has a Ram she painted in his office. Those are her only two “commissioned” pieces. Everything else she creates is for her. Definitely from her.
“Especially now. When I’m doing my art now, and I’ve gotten better at it and found my style, it’s a lot more fun to take things from my life and feelings and put it into my art,” Sydney said. “When you’re a kid, you don’t understand what that means. You don’t know why you choose blue for a certain feeling or an emotion. Now, when I’m feeling something, I’m trying to express something for people to see. I think it’s a lot more powerful.
“For painting, it depends on the message I’m trying to convey. Recently, I’ve been working on a series I call Hoop Dreams, and I use a collage. I’ve been cutting up magazines and cutting out figures. Mod Podge. Glue to canvas and paint around it. I like to paint things about people in my life, inspiration from people I care about. You’ll find a lot of my paintings are of my friends, happy memories. I think when you initially look at it, a lot of them are bright and almost childlike. I want to paint that feeling a lot of times of happy memories, happy feelings, happy, bright colors. It just depends on what message I’m trying to get out there.”
One of her favorite pieces from the series is a just a kid’s legs, standing in the grass with his worn out shoes, but his legs are made up of cutouts of basketball idols. She mocked a Sports Illustrated cover with a female player, but on the side were the negative comments female athletes often hear about body image.
In her art you will find her moods, and Cailyn Crocker has been fascinated from the start.
“Downstairs in their house, her art is everywhere, and I thought, ‘oh, she’s for real,’” Crocker said. “I personally love art and seeing different things. Now she’s experimenting with different things, even clothes. I have some hoodies from her that I wear all the time. She knits, she crochets. Some of our sweats for traveling that don’t fit, she’ll add extra length, or she makes them fit tighter. It’s a really cool thing to support her, but also to see creatively what she does.
“Her art is so unique to her. I can see her personality and who she is in everything she does. A lot of the artwork she does is based upon realism in her life. She has one hanging in the house and it’s literally her point of view of her watching herself watching TV. It’s an exact replica of if you’re sitting on the couch, but she put magazine cutups of different things and it’s cool how she uses her personal reality and brings it together with other things.”
The only place where she believes her two worlds collide are when it comes to absorbing criticism. In both worlds, the words to push somebody forward can sting.
It’s never been an issue for Williams, who would characterize her as a team-first player, taking every instruction she can with the collective goal in mind. If it requires her to personally improve in an area, she processes the information and does the requisite drills.
Entering college art classes, it hit just the same.
“It’s the competitive part of me. You’re always trying to push yourself to be better,” Sydney said. “Critique too. It goes hand in hand with sports. You get critiqued all the time as a basketball player, and that’s the same in art. I remember in undergrad some of it was harsh, but that’s good, because it made you better. I think that part goes hand in hand, and I really appreciate that. I had a professor tell me I take critique fine because I was used to it.”
Wanting to be better is part of her. You see it on the court, where her game has improved incrementally over the years. She’s always been a defensive standout, her 135 career blocks ranking fourth in program history, the 44 this season sitting fifth in a single campaign. Her work on the boards has increased each year, and in the past 15 games, so has her offense as a career 7.4 per game player is now averaging 10.0 a night.
Just the same, she likes the way her art has developed. A sketch book is too much to take on road trips, so she finds other avenues. Recently, she’s been doing picture stories on her phone. In her degree, she focused on how art can impact media. It has her thinking about what she can do professionally as an artist.
Where it may lead her is still to be determined, but she really wants to make teaching part of her life. She loves children, and the idea of teaching art classes at a school, even a community center, makes her face light up.
Just imagine, being able to help a young mind expand and create. To go from simple drawings for fun to becoming an alternate reality for them.
A place to go, where no one else is invited. A place to get lost in time creatively, producing something which explicitly communicates to others just where you were in that moment in life.
