November 11, 2014
By Mishalle Camacho-Kolakowska
Christine Dalenta is a meticulous artist.
Her art has been featured in numerous local and national shows, including most recently at the Barnes-Franklin Gallery at Tunxis Community College. She explores value and light through over-development and chemistry, creating ominous, and what she calls “hybrid,” pieces. Some of Christine’s work has been valued at upwards of $6,000, and she owes a great amount of her success to her ability to stay up late and drink black coffee.
“I haven’t always liked my coffee black,” she smiles, handing her card to the barista. “But at Brown, I didn’t have a fridge. I had to learn to like my coffee without cream or I don’t think I would have survived!”
Christine’s journey to becoming an artist was a long one. She was a first generation Polish-American, raised by two fairly strict parents: Alice and Martin Dalenta.
“Alice wasn’t always her name,” Christine confides, sipping her “I’ll have whichever mildest flavor you have” coffee. “She earnestly wanted to assimilate. Her name used to be Aleksandra.” She laughs and puts her coffee next to her pile of disorganized papers. Her father was different, and wanted her to find root in her culture.
Kindergarten was the only exposure Christine had to public education before she went to high school. “It was more stressful than you’d imagine. It was difficult to tell if what I was saying was in English or in Polish.” She blames her shyness on her inability to decipher between the two at a young age, and tells a story of when she asked her teacher to let her use the bathroom.
“I went up to her and spoke as slowly as I could,” she laughs. She said each vowel sound painstakingly slow as to ensure the teacher knew exactly what she was saying. “IIII- haaaave-toooo-goooo-toooo-theeee-baaaathroooom,” particularly emphasizing the word, “BADLY!”
After kindergarten, however, Christine entered SS Cyril and Methodius’ Polish school, a private, catholic institution that integrated learning the Polish language with academic and religious teachings. The school was very strict; even “corporal punishment” was tolerated. Christine spent eight years at SS Cyril and Methodius with a small group of close knit friends– her eighth grade graduating class was just shy of forty students.
Though difficult, she believes that the rigorous education she received at the school aided her in her acceptance to Brown. “Once you are and self identify as a good student, it self perpetuates in a way.”
Public high school was unknown territory for Christine. She was surrounded by new faces in an entirely new learning environment at Berkley High in Hartford. She “breezed through” a majority of her high school career, scoring a 1360 out of 1600 on her SAT. Her parents encouraged her to reach far and reach wide, so she did; she applied to Brown her senior year and got in with nearly a full scholarship.
But Christine wasn’t as gung ho about attending college, let alone an ivy league, as her parents were. “They told me things like, ‘Be a doctor! You’re so smart!’ even though I had no idea what I wanted to be.” She had other plans, however. “I thought about taking a year off, but my scholarship was contingent upon my going to college right after graduating, so I had no other choice.”
Once there, Christine felt lost. With no major and only a relative interest in art, she didn’t know where she would best fit in. She registered for a number of preliminary courses that she could apply to any number of majors, however, couldn’t get into any art classes until her second year at Brown. Though she was able to take a drawing class by her sophomore year, the school didn’t offer the one art form that Christine knew she loved: photography.
Brown had a consortium agreement with the neighboring art school, Rhode Island School of Design. “I couldn’t take any art courses at RISD until I took one at Brown,” Christie explains, sipping the last of her coffee. “So once I did, I signed up for photo at RISD right away and I knew there was something there.”
Christine excelled in her art classes, often advancing before her peers. What she was missing in academics, she found in her art. After attending a number of art lectures at Brown featuring sculptures, painters, designers and photographers, Christine realized that her place was not at Brown. After two and a half years, she dropped out to pursue her dream of becoming an artist.
Though RISD felt like a second home to Christine, and an ideal school to transfer to, the tuition was too much for her to take on without any help so she had move back to Hartford.
“I was working at a pizza parlor for eight years!” Christine belly laughs, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I was even the manager at one point!” She left her ivy league school behind to work at Prospect Pizza in Hartford so that she could put herself through art school.
It was a long journey for Christine, but after eight years of seemingly endless nights, sore backs and pruney fingers, she finally made it to the University of Hartford and got her Bachelor’s Degree in Photography, later receiving her Master’s in Fine Arts.
“Art rapidly became everything to me during school,” Christine smiles, packing up her papers into her black, worn binder. “And it’s not something that should be as dismissed as it is. Loving art is something you can’t just change about yourself. The secret to being a successful person is to be true to yourself and be authentic. I couldn’t give up on this– I had to be an artist. If I didn’t do all that I did, I would have always wondered, ‘What if?’”
Copyright © 2009 By Chensiyuan, via Wikimedia Commons
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