My first love was creating artwork.  I owe it all to my father, who was a trained artist and who I always looked up to and emulated because of that talent.  I would spend hours as a child creating hideous pictures with crayons and markers that I deemed “modern art.”  One of my first decipherable drawings, which my father still has, was a zebra which resembled more of a striped snake with box-like arms and legs than anything else.

 I also buried my head in books when I was kid.  But before I could even read, I used to sit and write letters of the alphabet in my pink and red Hello Kitty diary and ask my mom to take a look at the combination of letters I put together to see if I had formed any words.  The first words I successfully wrote were “milk” and “love.”  It’s funny how my first written words encapsulated what everyone first experiences of life with their mother.

 When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up the answer is and was still the same: an artist.  But now I paint with words instead of, well, paint.

 For much of my life, I was alone, left to my own devices to sit and dwell with my own imagination.  As I got older, I strove to find my niche, a crowd where my eccentricity was accepted.  I wanted to be around other creative types and now that I’m quickly approaching thirty, I’ve realized without noticing it that for the past decade and a half or so that I have surrounded myself with a vast community of people who are nothing but creators.

 I just thought we were having drinks and dancing, ingesting the occasional hallucinogen, but really I was being entertained by a crowd of musicians, DJs, graffiti artists, photographers, and dancers along with the random clown or two.  I always thought of the loud, pounding music as an interference to my writing and something for me to enjoy only when I was out socializing but now I realize that I was always in the midst of people creating, much like I do, but that they do so out loud, while my creativity comes softly on a page with my pen.

 On the surface we just look like a bunch of uneducated, shit-talking drunks but if you listen long enough we are great orators, libertines, people who speak their mind freely, people who are trying to rise above societal constraints and find a voice.  We are people who are struggling to find our way in life and once we do we will be ready to help change the world. 

 So, all in all, the arts have influenced me above and beyond anything else.  They inspire me and motivate me.  The world is my muse.  And I never would have realized my own potential within the arts, had it not been for the things I’ve picked up and read, the artwork I’ve pensively furrowed my brow over, the films I’ve scrutinized, the performances I’ve witnessed, the opera music which everyone seems to think is ridiculous that I wake to, the dozens of genres of music that give me an awesome liberation when I swing my limbs in wild dance to.  Had I not been exposed to all this, I never would have been able to be the artist that I am.