My favorite piece that I've done is a drawing of me getting my eye blown out by a snapping viola chord. And not for the morbid concept of the drawing itself! While it's certainly not one of my most impressive drawings, it's one that means a lot to me for quite a few reasons. The main reason is simply just that it's me! I've been posting art online for about 10 years at this point, and over this time I've sunk into habits that plague most "content creators"–being to create work to appease an audience rather than oneself. It's a tumultuous and depressing cycle, and one that's very easy to slip into time and time again online as social media makes it hard to avoid the pursuit of numbers. This habit caused me to neglect the aspect of myself in my work, which made the creation of art feel more distant to me, and caused me to begin enjoying the process less. Last year, I made the genuine effort to make sure that my online art presence panders to no one but me, and one of my ways of doing so was to occasionally turn the subject of focus in my artwork into myself! Since I am a person, I have many thoughts, experiences, and feelings, but not many ways to express them. I am autistic, so verbal communication often makes that method of expression extremely difficult. This is why my art–as it's a language in it of itself–means a lot to me as someone who struggles to express himself through more obvious means. I have a viola back at home. I do not play it. I am REALLY scared of tuning the strings. It is a very irrational fear of mine, and one of my only, really. I am very embarrassed to say such a thing out loud because reasonably, nothing terrible is going to happen! Maybe the chord will loosen itself because the amount of time you've wasted twisting the peg increment by increment wore away some of the wood. Maybe you put the bridge in a little crooked and when you tighten the chords, it'll make it fly out or fall over with a really loud sound. Startling! Still, not dangerous. BUT THAT'S NEVER HOW IT FEELS TO ME. That being said, that deep fear is just not something that I can convey with my mouth accurately enough to depict that despair I feel every time I try to tune my viola. So I'll just let my piece do the rest of that talking for me. Maybe, if I stop being scared of my viola, I can let it do some of the talking for me, too!

I was born to be an artist—primarily an animator, but all forms of visual art run through me (especially oil painting! I love oil painting!) Since I was a child, everyone who has ever known me, family, friends, teachers, they all knew that this was going to be what I did for the rest of my life. I knew this too, but I never realized how insane my goal was until a few years ago. I'm a Black Trans person, and despite this being America, being who I am in the field that I want to pursue has felt like it wants me to be hopeless. I want to succeed because the only thing I want is to carve out a path to achieve my dreams event with the odds seemingly against me. I want to revitalize the animation industry from the inside out. I want to make cartoon shows. I want to write books! I want to grow from there and make movies, and own a company for artists as passionate as me! I want to install a true passion for art in the masses we have never seen it before by being unabashedly myself. I have many people that I look up to, queer, Black, and disabled folk alike whom I see myself in, my friends, my art acquaintances, the celebrities who have made steps in paths similar to mine, but there's nobody like me doing what I want to do. My inspiration is that I want to be The Inspiration. I'm shooting for the stars– past our solar system, even. And I know it's difficult and maybe even unfeasible to do all the things I want to do in a lifetime. But when you're aiming so far, you're bound to get halfway there, at least. It's hard for me to not get wrapped up in the passion of my own dreams, but I have to be if I want to stay motivated. When you live in a world where everyday corporate higher ups and political executives want to severe humanity's ties to creativity and the arts, to devalue the role that artists play in history and society even as its being written, the easiest option would be to give up. To not bother with a battle so much bigger than one person. Being easy is so boring, though!!! I'm going to live my life doing all that I could have so that by the time I die, we've got more people like me running around trying to spread the passion of art for generations to come!