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About the art
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“In good company” 5.5x8.5 oil in mixed m
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  Every day I look into the mirror and introduce myself to a stranger. As I look, I update this stranger on where we’ve been. I tell her about the time I decided to regard my body as someone I love. Treating it kindly. Listening to it. Admiring it. I started painting self-portraits when I needed to study the beauty of me to learn how to be as soft to myself as the brush strokes are soft on the canvas as they create the divots and mounds of my body. If I put a great amount of work into getting the right color, light, and shapes to create myself on a canvas, then I should be able to put the same amount of work to getting my self-love language right.

  I’m a self-taught artist from Lincoln, Nebraska. I grew up admiring my mother’s drawings, immediately requesting my own pencil and sketchbook to try my hand at what I thought would be an easy feat, but looking back at some of my old sketchbooks, they were nothing short of astutely amateur. I grew up in Gordon, NE where I spent most of my summers with my best friend, staying up until dawn, drawing from a print out of our favorite actress. Progressively getting better at understanding proportions and highlights.  

 

As I got older, my drawing became more and more infrequent, until my best friend had moved to Lincoln to be my roommate. She and I easily fell back into our drawing-until-dawn lifestyle.

One year, we decide to save up our money, quit our jobs and go backpacking through Europe. I remember the exact moment in Venice, Italy. While I was shamelessly watching and admiring the people that lived in a city swollen with tourists. Admiring how they must be so present and mindful as they go about their daily lives and tasks without a recognition of the constant buzzing around them. I see a woman staining her table outside her door, a man learning mandarin as people hustle by on to the next shop, a boy playing the accordion hoping for some money, while another resident is enjoying a reversed perspective and watching the nonresidents gawking and aweing at the obvious beauty of the city. It was in this city that I really found a beauty in capturing these moments of unwavering presence; that I became inspired to translate the hues, saturations and tones of moments, onto a canvas.

About the artist
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