About

I began drawing for the first time when I was three years old. Whenever I started drawing pictures, I entered my own world; I could paint all day without getting tired. At that time, for some reason, my drawings were all drawings of little girls.

When I was in the first grade, one day my teacher took the whole class outside to sketch scenescapes. A beautiful tree caught my eye, and I painted the tree and the area around it. Later, my class was selecting pictures to enter in a school-wide art competition, and my teacher and some classmates suggested entering my painting. But some of my classmates said, “That painting is not a landscape. It’s just a painting of a tree.” I was proud of my painting. To me, it was a unique and beautiful landscape. I felt that some of my classmates misunderstood my creation. In the end, my picture was not selected for the competition. I was disappointed, and my feelings were hurt. It’s a complicated memory for me. It was a day I felt enthusiastic and enlivened by my art but was disappointed when others didn’t see and feel the same way about my artwork as I did.

Despite that upsetting experience, throughout elementary school, my dream was to become a cartoonist. Eventually, though, I felt too restricted drawing the same characters again and again, and I no longer wanted to become a cartoonist.

After graduating from high school, I did not attend art school because I had to work to help support my mother and younger sister financially. They needed my support because of a family tragedy that had occurred years before. When I was nine years old, on his way home from a friend’s house one evening, my father was struck and killed by a car. There were many repercussions of this for my family and me, and one was that I had to put aside my dreams for a while. As a working adult, I only did painting and drawing as a hobby, though sometimes friends commissioned paintings from me. But I never earned enough money from painting to quit my regular job, and many times I gave up on my dream of being a full-time artist.

Eventually, something special happened that inspired me to follow my dreams again. A mother cat and her eleven kittens brought themselves to my home. It is quite a story, one that is very important to me, and I look forward to sharing it with you one day. I am working on it now, and I will be posting it here along with some pictures. Reading it will surely give you some insight into who I am as a person and as an artist.