Art has always surrounded me, my family a great branching tree of dancers, poets, actors,

and singers. Art was as natural as breathing, a way of expressing myself and understanding
others. I found a voice for myself through visual arts, but held a love for music. Through my
father, who plays the piano, I found myself transfixed by Jazz, from Bill Evans to Chet Baker.
When my mother would cook it was to the lilting voice of Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James.
However, despite my enjoyment in listening to music, I always felt that playing it and
participating in the musical process was more of a long held dream than a reality.
From the cost of buying an instrument and paying for music lessons to a fear of public
performances and perceived failure, music was something that was very difficult for me. Instead
I turned to the visual arts, spending my time sketching and painting with watercolors. As I
approached high school, I set my sights on attending the Denver School of the Arts, an arts
highschool in my hometown. For months I practiced diligently, but was denied admission to the
visual arts program. The next year I applied instead to the Stagecraft and Design program,
attending the school for technical theater and focusing on lighting design. My love for visual arts
became tainted with the pressure I felt to not only create near perfect art, but also the financial
pressure if I were to pursue art as a career.
Throughout my time in highschool, I was in a community where there was both an
extreme passion for the arts as well as a great deal of stress and pressure put upon artists to be
successful. There exists a duality in the arts, a contradiction between feeling pulled by your
passion and facing the difficulties of existing in a capitalist western society that dictates which
art is considered valid. There is a feeling of extreme competition underlying the arts, often driven
by the monetization of the arts. It is sometimes difficult to break away from this system and see
the value in the act of creating art for the sake of art. One of my biggest gripes with the arts
highschool I attended was the lack of interaction between different types of artists. The system
we were in limited how we could creatively interact with other students, fostering even greater
feelings of competition and isolation. Art, even in more solitary art forms like visual arts,
benefits from interaction with other creatives, exchanging ideas and creating connections.
As I have grown as an artist, I have worked to let go of the restrictions I placed on my
creative process. My perceived failures are not actually failures, but a step in growing my ideas.
Through this change in mindset, I have picked up playing the guitar, allowing myself to make
mistakes and enjoy creating music even if it isn’t “perfect” music. The fear of failure and of
failing while others seem to succeed takes away the benefit of simply sitting down to create
something. I forgot the humanity in seeing the world around me and wanting to express how I
saw and felt about it to others. I forgot the language in art making.
The core reasons for why I create art may have been briefly obscured, but they never left
me. Art ties the individual to the community. It is a way of understanding who we are in the
context of others. Art is how I understand myself. My family is a great branching tree of artists,
and I am a branch on that tree. To me, art is as natural as breathing.