| What are your earliest memories related to art? | |
| When I was 4 or 5 I became really aware of art and especially my own experiences with using crayons! I loved the variety of wonderful colors and the subjects in coloring books. | |
| How and when did you start becoming an artist yourself? | |
| My mom bought paint by the numbers sets for all of her kids. I was the only one who was frustrated by them because they didn’t look like I wanted them too! My mom had been learning to paint with oil paints and she taught me the basics when I was around 9 years. I didn’t really embrace it until I was around 12 or 13. | |
| What was the evolution like toward finding your current voice and visual vocabulary? | |
| I am grateful that I’ve been exposed to a huge variety of art and art styles through the years partly because I have traveled and lived in so many places. That exposure was part of why I love painting a variety of subjects and I like vibrant colors and unusual lighting in my paintings. I also began reading about and studying artists from the past and present which gave me additional inspiration to paint and to try to develop my skills as a painter. | |
| What is your process like? | |
| I don’t like for subjects/compositions I want to paint just the time to do them all! I start with a composition and usually spend a good amount of time thinking through how to improve and make the composition really good. The next step is to get a rough drawing on the canvas or wood panel. After that I do a rough block in trying to get the basic lighting, colors, and lines correct. After that I go back and start with details usually moving from back to front but always anticipating the way to layer paint to give the painting proper persepctive. | |
| Is there anything from your artist statement that you wish to expound on, that you normally don’t have the chance to discuss? | |
| Behind every painting is a story. I often wonder what the story is behind many other artists creations. Some of my paintings have a fairly straightforward story but others are more intense and emotional. | |
| What do you try to control in your surfaces, and what do you leave to chance? | |
| I try to control perspective, contrast, and colors. There are always unexpected things in my paintings and usually they turn out to be good. | |
| Where do you see your work going from here? | |
| I am enjoying the opportunities to continue to hone my skills as an artist and broaden some of the subjects I paint. I especially look forward to developing the ability to paint portraits some day. I can paint human forms well but portraiture has been a much bigger challenge that I haven’t really worked on yet. | |
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