Excited. Overwhelmed. Grateful. Stunned and truly in awe.

These are the thoughts running through 75-year-old retired El Camino College art professor Harrison Storms’ head as he prepared to open his first solo exhibit on campus, Wednesday, Sept. 4.

The ECC Art Gallery filled with students, faculty and the general public shuffling through the corners ceases of the reception halls.

Storms taught life drawing at ECC for 30 years but soon after he retired Director and Curator of the Art Gallery Susanna Meiers offered him chance to have a solo show.

“I make a policy to offer to any full-time faculty members in the Art Department to have a solo show after they’ve retired,” Meiers said.

Storms expressed that his art form is based on the study of anatomy and made with acrylic paint. He usually spends a lot of time creating each of his pieces.

“The motivation has consistently been experimentation and just trying to see what comes up,” Storms said.

After a month long process of deciding which pieces to include in his show, “Johns Canyon” is officially open to the public.

Garrett Brown from Long Beach who is looked very fascinate by each of the body series that was on display.

“I really like the wall series that he’s done. I like the Leonardo Da Vinci like human figure one, and I like the risk that he’s taking on all of them,” Brown said.

Joshua Edwards, 20 computer science major, entered the art gallery just for a class requirement but walked into a bit of a surprise.

“It was more interesting than I thought it was gonna be; I started noticing he does these 14 horizontal lines on most of them and he ingrains colors in the lines its pretty cool,” Edwards said.

Harrison Storms’ “Johns Canyon” will be open until Thursday, Sept. 19.

Storms hopes his audience realizes through his work its that “art is beautiful”.