“For the storm drain project, I saw an ad on Facebook. And then there were a few local people in the community who shared it with me, and they were like, ‘Oh, you should apply for this.’
I did the first one in 2019 and really liked it. That was probably my first time doing something outside for the public, so it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do this!’ That was cool. And then I did it this past summer, too, for 2022.
For the first one, I’d done a lot of Van Gogh paintings. We’d had to choose an artist to copy and use to practice our style in high school, so I’d done Van Gogh picked kind of a post-Impressionist style. That inspired my first one – using that with fish. For the second, I wanted to keep it in the same style but with a twist. I took some aspects of the first and threw in the stylized lily pads with the triangles and the dragonflies.
Each of them I spent about a week doing.
When I was doing the last one, this family — they had, like, three kids — but they kept bringing me water and Gatorade. They brought me Starbucks one day, too! And I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so sweet.” I think that’s something that you don’t always experience.
I really like the supportive, small-town community in Goshen. There’s a lot of value for the art community there.
Goshen High School is definitely where I got my art training. In my junior and senior years, I took IB art there. That was when I started to spend a lot more time on art and become much more focused. It was a good, challenging environment, too, because there were eight other kids who were really dedicated, so we would explore different ideas together.
I’m painting a canoe right now for the White River Alliance in Indianapolis. They display different canoes in various state parks along the White River [the White River Art Canoes project]. When I applied for it, I used some of the projects I’d done in Goshen in my application. I chose wildlife and the White River as my theme.
I’ve also painted an electric control box in Muncie. For that one, I chose a theme of native Indiana flowers.
I just graduated from Ball State in Muncie. I studied landscape architecture, and I’m looking for jobs related to that in the Indianapolis area.
I feel like my focus is on connecting art to nature.”
