Since I was old enough to hold a crayon, I have had a passion for art. I used to doodle fashion designs on any paper I could get my hands on, including sushi menus, and I built “award-winning” Lego homes—fully landscaped—every Saturday morning. (In contests, I came in second behind a girl who had figured out how to build life-size Lego pianos and gorillas. She had a lot of Legos).

Art in every form—from charcoal to pastels to plastic building blocks—was perpetually my outlet and then I hit high school. The portfolio I built there provided a wonderful foundation for my college art career that extended overseas to Florence, Italy, the home of Renaissance Art and my two favorites: Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli. In Florence, I carried out a Renaissance Art apprenticeship, learning the ways of my art heroes the way they learned from their masters, and with the same materials.

Returning to the United States, I envisioned a career in Renaissance-style art. But then I found my love for photography and a well-timed trip to the Danish countryside’s Louisiana Museum gave me additional inspiration. These influences opened my eyes to fully pursuing photography, photo realism, and modern art and allowed me to indulge my enthusiasm for vibrant colors, strong, clean lines, and the vivid interplay of lights and darks.