What Sparked you to be an artist? 

Well, I think like most artists, I was always an artist. But the moment that I felt serious was when I first learned how to paint with oil paint when I was ten and I went to a class in Florida because Bob Ross was from the town nearby me and he had taught all these painting teachers to do this style that painting, like the Bob Ross television show. And so I kind of accidentally joined a class of retirees when I was ten. And at first we were like, oh, no, women in the wrong place. And they would just join us. So they took me and they adopted me and they taught me how to paint all these flowers, yeah, with oil paint. And then I felt like a really serious artist. 

What was the first art piece you’ve sold?

Well, I'm not sure. Basically, I don't exactly remember, but I do know that I used to sell to my high school teachers who would sometimes ask me to buy the things I had made in drama. And also sometimes my family would just be really cute and they would be like, oh, you need to take a class trip. Like, let me buy that painting from you or something. So I think there was one that I remember. I think my dad did that and it was a portrait of his girlfriend. And I also remember it was the first moment that I knew that other people thought I was an artist because when I was in high school, I was like a freshman and I had this huge painting. 

For some reason I had to carry it across the school and I was super embarrassed and I was like turning it towards myself so nobody saw it because I was like, they're going to make fun of me. And then people started to see it and they started to freak out. What the h*** are you paying? Oh, my God. It's amazing. And then I understood that they actually liked it and that it wasn't something I should hide. So for the first part that you sold, you have an image of something. 

The one I just talked about, and this is age. I was probably like 14-15 years old by then. 

What is your most meaningful art creation to date (December 2022)?

The most meaningful piece is one that I did recently and it's called the Medea. And it's meaningful for me because I had just done this really deep exploration of my kind of deepest, most hidden psychological fears and like a lot of healing around it and but a lot of the stuff that I was working on still felt very taboo. It was a very dark kind of family and childhood history and so there's always a strong taboo against talking about things like that. And so I had to just really break that taboo and work through sharing those things publicly, kind of through this artwork. 

And it's this huge artwork, and it kind of looks like a doll house, and it looks very inviting when you first see it, but the closer you get to it, the more you realize there's these kind of dense layers of history that are essentially about intergenerational trauma and how we heal that. 

How would you describe your experience working on the clock?

When I first started to work on the clock, the first thing I noticed was that, unconsciously, I had grabbed a piece out of my tile that felt very similar to the pattern on the pendulum. And when I placed it next to it, I was like, oh, my God, it's, like, almost the same. And it just made me feel connected to the history of craft in these old objects. And I think one of the things that I really love about the old objects is the handmade craft and the craft decisions that are sort of that kind of decorative language that you still see within the curves of the wood and the joinery and all these things that aren't both. They're not really present in modern furniture unless it's meant to look retro, you know? 

And so there's just something about that I was connecting with and then also just kind of enjoying when I was writing Time To Be Happy, I was thinking how I'm really in that moment right now for myself. I think before the pandemic, I was deep into, like, working through intergenerational trauma, and I was also doing a lot of really heavy projects, and then the send them a kid, and the whole world went into this heavy place, right? And now there's this moment of feeling, like, knowing that we just provide something together. Those of us that did that, there's this sort of imperative to celebrate life.