Becoming an Artist

My Mom and Dad took all of us to the Cleveland Art Museum on Saturday mornings to take art lessons for most of my childhood. It seemed that they packed all nine of us plus some willing friends into the station wagon every Saturday morning! We hated getting up to go but once we arrived at the museum, we loved exploring the galleries, both with our class and on our own afterward. The guards knew our family and would let us move through the galleries on our own to check out whatever displays we found interesting that day.

I continued taking art in high school, but it was a secondary interest in science. I went to college on a science scholarship, then midway through realized I wanted to pursue the arts and switched to graphic design.

Graphic Design was a satisfying career and deeply held my interest, but in my free time, I continued to sketch anyone I saw with pen and ink and watercolors.

Being active in the outdoors usually conflicted with the time needed to pursue fine art at a deeper level. But once I moved to Colorado and spent more time on the on the trails and in the mountains, beautiful scenes constantly appeared as watercolor paintings in my mind. So much so, I pursued classes and workshops to understand how to render all the details of a landscape into shapes on a painting. It has been fun discovering my own style and vision as I delved more deeply into the process.

Plus, there are so many other mediums to explore!