Bio

I was born in San Francisco in 1990 to a family of artists. Despite my parents being artists and my teachers praising me as creative, up until the fifth grade I wanted to be a scientist. An astronomer specifically. Something about the exactitude, the certainty with which you could predict the behavior or attributes of celestial bodies far bigger or hotter or more remote than the mind could imagine alone seemed to fold out into ideas about existence, the future, what it means to be human. Space was big but a scientist could measure its vastness and perhaps in discovering its dimensions one could begin to get a feel for the more ethereal questions as well. Of course, I wouldn't have put it like that at the time. When you're eight or nine years old space is just cool. I attended lectures by Michio Kaku, a Stanford professor of theoretical physics. I don't know if I totally understood them but I kept going. I was a weird kid.

Then one day in fifth grade I was drawing a horse in my notebook. I didn't want to stop, even when everyone could clearly see that it was a horse so I just kept adding more and more. I drew out every hair on it's hide until the whole thing was a uniform graphite grey. Not yet knowing much about formal concerns, the hairy horse wasn't much more bold, graphic or distinct than the sketched outline had been. There was something about it, though. Having lost myself in the process I felt something akin to what I sensed in the vast world of astronomy. Something that was much bigger than myself that asked the metaphysical questions, yet had a concrete measurable aspect as well. The horse I had drawn was most certainly a horse but it had been translated and redefined through being put down on paper. It wasn't just a horse anymore. From then on I decided to become an artist.