Without his Friday painting sessions, Jake Merioles says, ‘I wouldn’t be the person I am today.’

In this first-person narrative, Jake Merioles, a sophomore at UC Berkeley, tells UC Berkeley News about the joy he finds in painting scenes across campus, and how art complements his academic pursuits in engineering.

I paint outdoors on campus once a week, around 2 to 5 p.m. Each semester, I’ve made sure to leave one day free from classes so I can paint. My classes this spring have left room for a perfect painting session every Friday.

I’m a sophomore from Fullerton, California, studying civil engineering. My passion for engineering developed in high school. I had classes that challenged me to collaborate with teammates to design and engineer a product, such as a wooden go-cart, catapult or portable sauna.

I also have an older brother who recently graduated from the University of California, San Diego, studying electrical engineering, and I look up to him when I think about my career path. I hope to be a structural engineer in the aerospace industry.

I’ve also liked art all my life. My family has supported me throughout my endeavors in art. My dad is a professional photographer, so we like to converse about composition, color theory, subject matter and more.

I began to take serious art classes in high school and practiced drawing and using oil paint. I fell in love with oil paints and wondered what I could achieve if I practiced more.

Every week, I’d put in hours of painting at home and read books and watch videos to get better. The house would often get smelly from the oil paints!

I mostly paint landscapes outdoors, and I love taking a scene before me and exaggerating various shapes, colors and forms to trigger an emotional feeling from the viewer.

Every time I paint, I ask myself, “How can I paint this in a way that makes people feel a certain way about what I see?” It gets me in a problem-solving mindset, like in my engineering classes.

The Berkeley campus has a beautiful combination of nature and architecture. I love the different walkways around campus and how nature is formed around them.

I’ve painted many places, such as the Campanile, Sather Gate, Sproul Hall, Memorial Glade, the Crescent Lawn and 4.0 Hill [a grassy slope behind the Faculty Club where it’s a tradition for students to roll down it, hoping to earn a 4.0 GPA].

Painting the Campanile is difficult — it’s challenging to accurately depict its shape, architectural features and colors. I’ve painted it four times, with each session posing various challenges.

But my goal isn’t to realistically paint what I see. It’s to look at a scene, visualize the colors that could be implemented and then exaggerate those colors so that they convey my emotional response.

People have said, “Jake, you’re going to run out of places to paint on campus.” But recently, a friend mentioned a balcony on the 7th floor of Davis Hall, and an engineering professor let me onto it through a door off his office. It had this incredible view of the Campanile.

There are times I want to paint alone, but most of the time, on Fridays, my friends are with me laughing, talking and playing music while I’m painting. When people pass by, I also love being friendly and conversing with them.

I’ve had a few people tell me they see art differently because of what I do, and that gives me more of a reason to keep on painting. As an engineering student, I aim to prove that art matters just as much as STEM-related fields.

I’m just as focused on my passion for structural engineering as I am for painting. I haven’t taken any art classes here at Berkeley, but being able to paint weekly on my own time provides a nice balance, a creative outlet to express myself. I want to have room in my life for that.

This summer I’m interning at SpaceX in Starbase, Texas. I’ve heard there’s an amazing beach on the Gulf of Mexico with a nearby launch site. I’m hoping to bring all my painting supplies. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t paint for three months.