In my Commercial Art class, in the Fall of 2004, I developed an obsession with shoes. All of my assignments had to do with shoes, and I also experienced my own shoe collection to be growing during this time as well. Steve Madden where my particular favorites, both to draw and to wear, although I can say that I drew far more than I owned. This particular piece was the first of the shoe series and was done with a felt tipped pen. It did receive a place in the student art show the following Spring.

Ink, 12" x 9".

The Dictionary Game

My sophomore year of high school I was in a commercial art class, with perhaps the most brilliant and definitely the coolest teacher ever, Mr. Hansen, and the assignment was to create drawings that defined words. It was a difficult task to think of which words to use, but I think I was pretty clever.

Colored Pencil, 9" x 6" each, completed Fall 2004.

War on Terror

This was completed in the same 8th grade art class on March 3, 2003, so shortly after the war on terror was officially announced in the newspapers. I had become obsessed with everything following September 11, 2001. Every square inch of the walls in my room were covered with newspaper clippings starting from the morning after the towers were hit, and I was constantly adding to them. I religiously read the newspaper everyday at school and was clipping articles and pictures all the time. The medium for this piece is oil paint and newspaper, it's 18" x 11.5", and I won 2nd place in a community college art show.

Water Color Pencils

This was done in 8th grade art class, with a teacher whom I didn't care for personally, but she had some quite brilliant assignments, this being one of the less brilliant but it still turned out pretty well. She always pushed us to use new types of medium and go outside of the comfort box. I didn't really know what to draw, so I just kind of went at it. When I was done with the water color pencils the whole picture looked like I was trying to draw a blocky stained glass window, but then when I applied brush and water it blended all the colors quite nicely and my batty teacher was impressed.

Water Color Pencil, 15.25" x 11".

A Series of Reoccuring Moments

I drew each of these independently of eachother, without realizing how similar they were until I found them all years later. I find it interesting that at troubled times in my life the same image came to my mind. The first of the series is here at the left, and it occured in a time of my life when I was very depressed and confused, at the age of 12. The second in the series is below, done two years after the first, as a freshman in high school using watercolor. The third below that was at perhaps my most troubled part of high school, my sophomore year, when one of my close friends turned to drugs and was overtaken by depression, and in turn his sister and some friends came to blame me for breaking his heart and causing him to use these self destructive ways. The anger portrayed is a combination of frustration from what was going on in my life and frustration with the medium of oil pastels. And the fourth of the series is simply pencil, done in a more settled time than the previous three, during my junior year of high school. I was clearly trying to figure myself out, as many do at the end of their high school years.