I started drawing at four, in my grandfather’s office, with a mug of coffee he’d let me cut with a diabolical amount of Carnation creamer while Walker Texas Ranger played in the background. He’d hand me printer paper or leave me to play on MS Paint while he napped in his chair. I would crank out elaborate depictions of my dreams, imaginary characters, and a rotating cast of alter egos I planned to become.

My family moved a few times while I was a kid - the house we bought in the nineties and sold not long after, my parents working overtime. I landed at a new school in the middle of fifth grade and by then had gotten the message that my loud, expressive, and wild quirks were not charming to a lot of people. So I got quieter. What didn’t get quieter was my obsession with all things beautiful, and magical, and the deep conviction that something more interesting was going on than what was in front of me. 

Paper absorbed all of it. I drew on my bed, mostly, since drawing at the kitchen table meant interruption. Anime got me at seven and I got pretty good at it, then spent a summer teaching myself anatomy because I really wanted the faces to look ‘real’.

It was always the faces for me. First the eyes, then every small muscle around them - how they conspire to give someone away. You can see when something’s churning behind a face that’s being asked to stay still. The curiosity to understand what’s hiding there is probably why I’ve spent thirty years drawing it. Now it’s oil and gouache and the churning is bigger than one expression. There’s a lot of territory to uncover in this world: cultural memory, the parts of a heritage that thin with each generation, what it means to hold onto something you were only given in pieces.