When I was four years old, I said I wanted to be an artist, like my mommy, the art teacher.  As I grew older, I began to ponder what a silly idea that truly was and abandoned the concept altogether—I once got scolded by my kindergarten teacher for not coloring in the lines and had to miss a recess because of I couldn’t control my hand.  I spent that recess with crayons in hand and a new picture to color, which I spent coloring the way the other students colored…bold colorful outline around the black outline with a lighter interior.  As much as I tried to forget that moment, looking back at the moment, I don’t feel embarrassed anymore for what the teacher perceived as sloppiness, but more because I didn’t hold to my kindergarten guns and walk my own path.

        Years later, my mommy sat me down in her classroom with watercolors to keep me occupied as she worked.  Most of the pictures I painted never amounted to much and I haven’t seen them since, but I did have breakthroughs when I was nine recreating my first work of art by an artist I admired sincerely—mommy.  Though my watercolor recreation never amounted to much beyond praise and was probably lost when my parents divorced, it sparked a fire in my soul I tried to regulate every day.

        I loathed the paintings I created—they weren’t photorealistic like some of the artists my mother exposed me to like Terry Redlin, nor were they the flawless oil paintings I saw for the first time in the Minneapolis Art Institute—works I never fully appreciated because my mother had always taught me that art didn’t have to look like something, a trip I found quite boring at the time.

        I sought to extinguish the flame of art at every turn—I stopped painting as I entered high school, I stopped doodling in the fourth grade when I was scolded for covered a classmate’s homework with red ink drawings when I was supposed to be grading, and I stopped drawing after I took the required junior high art classes from my mother.  I never took another art class from my mother and only took Design I to fulfill a general requirement.

        But when I found myself depressed over a pain so strong I couldn’t tell anyone, I sat down in my room and took up my palette knife.  I threw paint on the canvas board with reckless abandon in a furor that could only be expressed by my emotional state—I was so angry and so sad over what had happened that I produced my first painting since I was in junior high.  Though abstract, it turned the burner on my artistic soul up to the levels of a blast furnace that culminated in a renewed interest in art as well as thirty beautiful works of frustration, sadness, and anguish.  It was then that I decided to create art for myself—though other people may happen to see them, I prefer to work away from others if I can.

        My inspirations in art stem from the emotional qualities of VanGogh, coupled with the German Expressionists of ancient, as well as modern times.  Lastly, I am inspired by the youthfulness of Picasso, who wasn’t afraid to push beyond what we defined as art as well as taking a giant step backwards, back to the kindergarten class where I colored out of the lines.