“I always really loved art my classes, whenever I had an opportunity to take more I always would,” said Morgan Fitzgerald, a Community High School senior. Fitzgerald has been taking art classes since preschool, but she always looked seemed forward to her art classes more than her peers.

Fitzgerald’s love for art started early with her elementary school art teacher.

“ [She was] really awesome, like such an amazing person and everything I wanted to be,” Fitzgerald said.

Throughout her years, Fitzgerald’s teachers gave her a space to create her art through projects and assignments. Some teachers, like her middle school art teacher, would let her out of assignments so she could have time to work on the art she loved.

When she was young, Fitzgerald focused mainly on simple sketches and things she could do with the supplies she had at home. Since her parents run a child care, she always had access to craft supplies, helping to fuel her love for art.

As she grew, Fitzgerald found that the medium that really called to her was ceramics.

“It’s like as much as I enjoy sketching or whatever, I’m not good at like realism, and that’s always what I want to do,” Fitzgerald said. “With clay it just comes more naturally to me, it makes more sense, because it’s the real thing that I’m forming with my hands.” Fitzgerald took ceramics as an elective as many as six times, to the point where she simply used the studio to create, and skipped the class lessons.

Working on art now, Fitzgerald takes a lot of her inspiration from music, drawing emotion and feeling from songs and channeling that into her work. She was also inspired by her brother, who, much like her, always loves to make art.

“My brother has always been like a really good artist, so a lot of his hobbies and interests kind of rubbed off on me,” she said. Fitzgerald hopes or keep art in her life as a hobby as she moves on from high school, and into college.