I have been drawing and painting as long as I remember, and my parents were always very supportive of me. When I turned 10 years old, my parents bought me a set of Bob Ross oil paints, and I was soon tearing through canvas panels like there was no tomorrow. Eventually I graduated to stretched canvasses, and started to attend workshops hosted by local artists — where I was easily the youngest participant in the room by 40 or 50 years. I kept telling my parents that I was going to be an artist, and they kept telling me “That’s fine, as long as you get a degree in business.” I didn’t listen to them – I majored in art.

Unfortunately, my plan of concentrating on painting within the major was foiled during my Junior year. I decided to spend the first semester studying abroad in Italy with a program from a different university. Since all of the painting classes at Yale are year-long classes (as opposed to the majority of classes, which only last a semester), I wanted to make sure that I would be able to join one of the painting classes when I returned from Italy. The Dean of the Art School promised me that it wouldn’t be a problem, so I went to Rome and spent my days sketching ruins and snapping photos in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. When I returned to Yale for the spring semester, though, I found out that the Art School had undergone a shake-up. There was now a new Dean. As the new Dean had no written record of the former Dean’s promise to me, I wasn’t allowed to take a painting class. Since the senior year is spent working on a thesis, and I didn’t have the prerequisite painting class I needed to do a painting thesis, I was forced to choose another concentration. As fate would have it, I chose filmmaking.

The filmmaking concentration eventually led me to a job in video production out of college, and then on to film school in California. But I still yearn to draw and paint just as much as I did in college. I recently began participating in uninstructed figure drawing and painting workshops at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, and many of those drawings and paintings are posted here. In addition, I have begun work on some other paintings, and will post photos upon completion. Eventually, I hope to build a body of work to display in a gallery, as my dream of being an artist has never died.