All-Around Talent (Cal Sports Quarterly, Summer '14)
Note: This article originally appeared in the Cal Sports Quarterly Summer 2014 issue. To view the original spread in PDF form, click here.
From Gymnastics to Art, Alicia Asturias Enjoys a Wide Variety of Interests
By Mara Rudolph
Like gliding a brush on canvas, Alicia Asturias flicks her wrist through the air, painting invisible lines through the empty space.
It’s a movement she’s practiced thou- sands of times, exuding Michelangelo-esque elegance despite balancing on a four-inch wide beam more than four feet above the ground. A coy wink here and a feisty smile there and suddenly Asturias is channeling Mona Lisa’s sass on the gym floor, creating a masterpiece comprised of tumbling passes and choreographed dance moves.
For the Cal women’s gymnastics senior captain, there are many parallels to be found between her sport and the art world.
“Done right, gymnastics makes things that are difficult look really effortless,” Asturias said. “I think that painting has that same aspect where you’re going through these very detailed motions, but when you step back you get a full, smooth picture. That’s where the two artistic forms blend together.”
Though art and gymnastics are vastly different forms of expression, Asturias excels at them both. While this season alone Asturias was named an NCAA second-team All-American, regional Gymnast of the Year and All-Pac-12 first-team member, like a modern-day version of Renaissance Man Da Vinci, Asturias’ aptitudes extend far beyond the gym floor.
The Granite Bay, Calif., product dabbles in everything from singing – she performed a very well-received acoustic version of electronic music DJ Avicii’s “Addicted to You” at this year’s Oskis (Cal Athletics’ year-end awards ceremony) – to psychology. But it’s her love for art that rivals her passion for gymnastics.
“Art is an easy way to do something fun for me, whether I’m too tired to do any- thing else because of practice or whether I have all this excess energy that just manifests into a bunch of paintings,” Asturias said. “It’s awesome being able to create your own universe. Art is a place for me to be in my own head without getting wrapped up in the things that we can’t control.”
Asturias often works with acrylic paints because she is attracted to the bold colors, and describes her style as a mix of both realistic themes and stylized elements.
“I’d say it’s a combination of juxtaposition between the real and the unreal, where I’ll have something that’s more cartoony,” she said. “That kind of mimics my life in a sense, because I have this ability to stay real and then have the ability to go and get creative and have my own spin.”
Her creativity has seeped into many aspects of her gymnastics as well, complementing both her mental and physical abilities. At 5-foot-7, Asturias can punctuate a clean floor routine with long, bold lines exaggerated thanks to her height, similar to the way thick black lines and borders exaggerate much of her artwork.
“My gymnastics style has attitude and my art has attitude, too,” she said. “It’s about adding my own flare on things, whether I do a really unique thing on bars or being incredibly sassy in my floor routine.”
Like gymnastics, which Asturias has been practicing since she was three, art has been an integral part of her life from a young age. She fondly remembers many turns at the easel since as far back as preschool and began to fully develop her love for painting in high school, even dabbling in getting her artwork in galleries and creating series of works.
“I had a phenomenal art program and I think that’s what ignited the fire and showed me it’s not just a hobby you can have and that you can do amazing things while sharing your art,” Asturias said.
But only recently has she opened up to sharing her works with peers from out- side her art circle.
“It’s something that you put so much time into and you’re really vulnerable,” Asturias said. “To hear people comment on my artwork was really uncomfortable for me.”
Last year, she participated in an Art for Social Change course as part of the university’s DeCal program in which students create and facilitate their own classes. The students put together a gallery event featuring a social issue of each artist’s choice, with topics including environmental awareness and sustainability, the United States prison system and sexual violence.
“That’s really when I let people know what kind of artist I was and let people into my obscure background life that is art,” Asturias said.
Since the show, Asturias has become more actively involved in the local art community. She helped put on a “Take Back the Night” women’s rights gallery showcase and volunteered to teach weekly art classes at the Alzheimer Institute of the East Bay, where her lessons catered to the unique mental and physical needs of Alzheimer patients and went hand-in-hand with her major.
“It was this crazy melting pot of all the things I enjoy – talking to people and doing art, and obviously the psychology component is really interesting,” she said.
Not only is psychology another interest of Asturias’, it’s yet another subject she excels at. Asturias is Cal’s first women’s gymnast to be named a Capital One Academic All-American since Sigall (Kassutto) Bell in 1992, and this season Asturias was named the Pac-12 women’s gymnastics Scholar-Athlete of the Year. She is also a three-time first-team Pac-12 All-Academic selection and a two-time NACGC Scholastic All-American.
Though she ultimately plans to attend medical school to pursue pediatric orthopedics or psychological research, Asturias became hooked on psychology after taking an Advanced Placement course in high school and stuck with it as her major through college.
“In gymnastics you learn that the sport is 99 percent mental, but I wanted to figure out why,” Asturias said. “So I started in psychology and not only did I learn about sports psychology but about social psychology and things that affect not only my athletic life, but also social existence,” Asturias said. “The versatility of the field really resonates with me because I dabble in so many different things.”
Though pursuing so many interests in college required quite the balancing act, Asturias, like any artist, knows that a dab of something here and a daub of another there oft makes for a vibrant masterpiece.
“The wildly different paths life has allowed me to pursue are no doubt rigorous and rewarding all on their own, but for me it has truly been the inter- section of these lines – the sometimes, if not most times – messy mixture of all these things that create my own unique picture of reality,” Asturias said.