Growing up in Colorado I have been constantly exposed to the arts. From street art and festivals to museums and galleries, everywhere I looked seemed to be imbued with creativity. Through these early experiences, alongside constant encouragement from my parents, art helped me shape my understanding of the world from a young age. Art started to shift away from a casual hobby or a quirky personality trait but could only be described as an immense constant throughout my life. Art became a way for me to digest my existence, my interactions, and surroundings with the world, a way to create a physical portrayal of my sentiments. As I transitioned from elementary to middle school, I auditioned and enrolled in the Denver School of the Arts, where my focus became primarily creating art. My world revolved around perfecting paintings, alongside becoming enthralled with the ever-expanding art industry around me. I found that every project tasked me with thinking more critically and feeling more deeply. I soon found myself facing one of my most challenging endeavours with the arts: entering into my senior year and working to compose a portfolio of my work alongside attempting to decide if this was a path I wanted for my future while applying to numerous colleges. I found myself grappling with this dilemma throughout much of my first semester. Many had told me that pursuing the arts would not be sustainable for my future, that I should rather seek a more stable path and create on the side of my studies. Though the concept felt foreign, seeing as though creating had always been the center of my world. At the end of the year, my school allowed students to have one last performance, a senior show, in which I was able to display all of the hours I poured into my pieces across a gallery space. Throughout the entire process, my classmates and I were tasked with everything from hanging up our work down to directing how the lights would descend across our paintings. After a week of refining and tweaking, it was opening night, and although I found myself much more nervous than I had anticipated, family, friends and mentors soon filled the space with laughter and love. Throughout the night I watched as people paused and carefully observed, processing and connecting to my ideas. In that moment I felt proud of what I had created; I felt as though I had a voice through my pieces, one that I needed to explore and grow. I’m planning on continuing my pursuit of the arts through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall, where I will be working towards receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a focus in painting. My goal is to continue to grow as an artist while interacting with new perspectives and ideas that will influence me to exceed my expectations of myself. With a continued education in the arts, I want to be able to create something that is meaningful. Something that I am not only passionate about but that also allows others to feel inspiration from. Receiving a scholarship like this will allow me to make a difference in achieving those goals. Not only that, but it helps to ease the financial burden of a continued education, allowing me to devote more attention to my focus on the arts without worrying about the cost of my attendance or the materials that I may need along the way. More importantly, this scholarship will represent my potential, encouraging me to continue, to create a lasting impact.

My work is heavily inspired by my interactions with the world around me. Throughout the entirety of my art-making processes, I take into consideration the cultural norms and perspectives that make up my perception of our society. In my earlier works, I honed in on interpreting others’ perspectives of interactions and experiences outside of myself, coming to the realization that billions of others exist, and exist within an individualistic sphere. This idea has flowed into my most recent work, maturing and shifting into how others interpret cultural norms and gender on a personalized spectrum. My work helps to interpret and digest ideas and concepts that exist outside of myself, processing perspectives that I would potentially not have otherwise considered. Spending hours on a piece allows me to sit with a concept and truly understand what it is that I’m creating. My process usually starts with a sketch: a brain dump of everything that I might want to incorporate in my work, which then becomes narrowed down and condensed into a final vision. From this point, I go to take my reference photos from which I will create my art. I then move to the creation of my pieces. More often than not, my art takes form through acrylics, a media I’ve worked with for most of my life. Because of my comfortability and experience with the medium, I’ve found that it is the most fluid way to express my ideas, while making sure to stay consistent with technique and style. Branching out from my comfortability with acrylics, my most recent portfolio has experimented with the incorporation of 3D elements. I hope that this incorporation will help to more clearly communicate my ideas, while including significant elements that add a new depth to my pieces. Through the visual arts department at my current high school, I have been given the opportunity to truly explore exhibitions and competitions that are willing to show my work. Throughout high school, I have been able to exhibit in the National Western Stockshow, alongside the Scholastic art and Writing exhibition and the City Wide Art Contest at the Denver Art Museum. Having my art hung up in spaces outside of my school has given me a new perspective by broadening my view to artists and styles that exist outside of my peers in the classroom. I hope that a continued education in the arts through a university will allow me to continue to find these new perspectives and grow further as an artist, pushing myself past my current comfort zone while exploring new media and ideas.