a bit about myself

I spent much of my childhood by myself(in the good way) just imagining and creating whatever I could with anything I could find. Later that turned into keeping shoe boxes of little parts of broken toys that I could use for art. Later that turned into learning how to MIG weld and selling robot sculptures on Etsy made from junkyard parts and sound/ light components from Happy Meal toys. Later that turned into the desire to create things from mud when I took my first ceramics class in college. I fell in love with the medium just as much as I loved rusted metal.

The rest should have been history, but it wasn’t exactly.

A detour: I had taken a break from college after an apartment fire ( don’t worry everyone was fine including my dog at the time, Charley Chaplin ). I took up a few jobs to pay off the damages which took me away from art for a bit; Advance Auto Parts, St. Pete Times, The National Art Association and then Verizon Wireless. Although I was decent at sales, I didn’t care for it. Felt like we were saying a lot of half truths to customer that managers wanted to push in order to keep sale numbers high. If I wasn’t going to do art, I wanted to at least have a position where I was helping people.

I started a position in the fraud department at Capital One in 2012. There were no shortages of ways I could help the business, my peers and customers that were experiencing ID and transactional fraud so I stuck around and earned a few promotions dealing in process and project management. I honestly learned more progressing through my career at Capital One than I had in college, and the 9-5 grind also afforded me the opportunity to do pottery at a local studio on my free time up until the pandemic hit. Eventually, however, I worked myself into a few health hiccups by the end of 2022. It forced me to reset, rewire and turn back to art. Where I need to be.