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.

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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.