1994 - one step back before moving forward.
From the time I was very young I drew and painted. I won my first art “contest” in 1st grade with a drawing at the Wisconsin State Fair.
Over the years, I became somewhat skilled at it and later my favorite type of drawing was figure drawing. This tied into my fascination with the workings of the human body that had come out of my Anatomy and Physiology class in high school. The first drawing here is from my Figure Drawing class in college. I felt very accomplished and my professor gave me a lot of compliments which didn’t hurt.
My high school art teacher had actually chosen me for an art program whereby select students from around the Milwaukee area were bussed down to the Milwaukee Art Museum one day a week during their last semester of high school. It was called Art Satellite. The art museum was our classroom and we would get art history lectures as well as technical lessons all from within the museum. it was one of the most formative experiences in terms of my relationship with a museum collection. My parents had always been very involved in the arts in Milwaukee and they had even served on various boards at the museum when I was a child. The Milwaukee Art Museum will always feel like my home art institution. The smell of it is almost as familiar as my childhood home.
My high school art teacher also helped me enroll at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) for a summer course in figure drawing. I was taking the course with college students and though I was initially intimidated by the older students and the situation drawing a nude person for the first time I fell in love with this specific type of drawing. The drawing seen here was from a short gestural warm up before longer poses by the model.
