I always loved art. I started drawing as a child, as I think most people do, and as I grew up it seemed like art was something that would only remain at my side as a hobby. I liked doodling on loose leaf paper, and making little comics for my sisters, but that was about it. When I entered high school as a freshman I decided to take a painting class as my elective for the year. The woman who taught the course was named Mrs. Bennett and she would change my life forever. I considered myself to be someone who was good at drawing, but I didn’t think of myself as an artist. A few months into this painting class Mrs. Bennett began to challenge that. I had a competitive spirit and so I approached every class with a desire to be the best and to work the hardest. My teacher saw that, and she recognized that within my self inflicted competition there was the seed for potential. She began to push me by giving me additional assignments, and encouraging me to start learning about contemporary artists. When the end of year parent teacher conference came around Mrs. Bennett told my parents she recommended me taking classes over the summer at the art academy in our neighboring city. When my parents expressed financial concern she assured them that she would find scholarships and other forms of aid to make my attendance possible. She thought that out of all of her students I was one of the few that contained the budding passion that would make the extra time and money worth it. That summer added a sort of weight to art for me. It couldn’t be a hobby anymore; my teacher saw a future for me. I attended a school that offered both AP and IB courses, and Mrs. Bennett encouraged me to take AP art and IB art my junior and senior year respectively. During those years she taught me not only how to make art but how to think about art. We would spend every week watching interviews with artists, reading art theory articles, learning how to critique and how to interpret art. She taught me how to look, how to read, how to speak, and how to make. Her classroom became a space for respite. I struggled a lot in high school especially when it came to my mental health. Art was an escape, and it gave me access to a way of speaking without words during a time when I had no words to describe what I was experiencing. Mrs. Bennett was the best mentor I could have asked for during this time. She encouraged me to make the art I wanted, but she pushed me to make the art I wanted in the strongest way possible. She inspired a passion within me that I still carry to this day. When it came time to choose a career I knew I wanted to be a painter, but I never would have made that decision if I hadn’t taken Mrs. Bennett’s painting 1 class. She made me who I am as an artist today and I owe everything to her.

There is a thread of magic throughout every object, every stone, every tree, every breath a person takes in this world. Another word for it would be the soul. Every piece of art I have made since I began painting has been an attempt to capture this soul. I spend hours out in nature with my brushes and oils and I try desperately to find a way to portray the magic that I see around me, to find a way to express the way I see the world to others. With every painting I get a little closer to this goal. Recently I have been drawn to the beauty of grass. It's a part of our world that is easily overlooked, but to me it is beautiful like an ocean. It overlaps and plays with shadow and light and dances in a breeze. It soothes an itch within my work that cannot be matched by anything else. Sometimes I want to make art that is grand and monumental, but life is what happens in the everyday moments and in the parts of the world that are overlooked. There is so much beauty and magic in the small, the mundane, and the ordinary. There is so much beauty in grass. My job is to help people see that. I want to find the beating heart in each person, tree and passing cloud and memorialize it in some way that will outlive me. One day I will die, but my paintings will live on, and my art will always contain a part of me and my vision in it. There is a sort of eternity in that.