My roots.

My earliest art-making memories include coloring books with my grandmother and family friends. "Color in the lines" was a common phrase I remember hearing. As a youngster, my mom saw some sort of knack I had for art and really pushed me to color and draw and do all sorts of art. One Christmas I got an easel that had a chalk board, white board, and some sort of paper roll that I could use tempera paint on. That thing was awesome.

Anyway, when I entered elementary school, the schools in California had already cut art programs from elementary school. The only art we did was with parent volunteers or the teacher usually had us make a placemat around the holidays. I still have some sort of hand turkey and a decorated pine cone. When I was 10, I moved to New York where they still had/have art programs in elementary/middle school. I remember getting my schedule for the 5th grade and seeing an art class on there and being super excited (this was also before I met some of my peers who made middle school totally unfun and terrible). My first art teacher was Ms. Finkler (who later became Mrs. Armstrong), and I only remember her because she was indeed my first art teacher, and a damn good one at that. Her art class made such an impact on me that I kept my portfolio (rather, my mom did), and I have a couple of pieces from then.

The piece above is a watercolor still life. I thought I did good on it, but it never made it into the display case at school, so I was kind of sad, but not enough to be discouraged or anything, because like I said, Ms. Finkler was awesome (total run on sentence, oh well).

Life continued on, and I continued doing art. Art was actually my outlet from the torment and whatnot that middle school brought to me. By 8th grade I had another awesome art teacher named Ms. Korn if I remember correctly. She was this awesome hippie lady who was another person to push me with the art making. I might have also had her in 7th grade. I feel like I had her twice, but really, this is 15 years ago we are talking about here and I can't remember much. We did one-point perspective words, so I did this piece:

I kept that, but nothing else from that year, so I'm not sure what else we did in class.

The next year was high school, which I label the beginning of the end. I had a cool studio art teacher. I felt bad for her because kids in our class threw erasers at her and made her cry. She retired the year after our class. She never really overly pushed anyone into art, which in a way was a good thing because it's not like she had favorites or anything, she was just kind of over her job at that point (and I could see why with people throwing erasers at her). During that time I made a bunch of stuff I kept:

Still life with...potatoes?

The next year I enrolled in Drawing and Painting. This is where things went bad. I had a teacher who essentially didn't like me. He had his "chosen ones" we will say, who he pushed into Pratt and such, and I was not on his radar for going into art school. The first drawing I ever did in his class, he actually kept. After that he never even took a slide of my work and just gave me grades that I think he picked out of a hat. I didn't mind since they were all A's, but I never saw a rubric of any kind.

When I got into his class I thought my art was pretty decent for a 10th grader. Like, if I had students come in with this ability, I would be impressed:

Then the next year I noticed he didn't really care for my art, and seemed to go for people with more "expressive" styles...so I tried out this new style for myself hoping he would maybe pay attention to my stuff:

After two years of doing the same exact projects...I expected to still take AP Studio and still pursue my goal of being some sort of artist. I knew this teacher didn't like me, but I was still going to take what I needed to do my thing. Unfortunately, my plans failed as this teacher told me I was "too lazy to be an artist" and he didn't recommend me for AP. I went home crying that day and my mom had a meeting with him. He straight up told her that, yes, I was indeed too lazy to be an artist and that I should probably do something else. For some unknown reason, I still signed up for his damn drawing and painting class again for a third year (since I couldn't take AP Studio), and created some scary scribbly stuff:

The scariest piece of all.

To be honest, I don't even have all my work from senior year because I ditched half the classes. I went into college the following year as a math education major. My major obviously changed and I will get into that at a later date.