“I started teaching in August. I love my kids so much.
I like making art that looks realistic, but you can tell that it’s art. I feel like, with acrylic, I would spend too much time trying to make it look like a photograph. With watercolor and charcoal, I feel like I can be more expressive and creative with it.
Watercolor, I find, is somewhat similar to drawing. It’s not as intense in its color as acrylic. I’ve never really worked with oil, but I’ve begun experimenting with lighter value and shading with watercolor. It’s different in that I’m adding the aspect of color, but it’s still got that translucent feel.
All my work is portraits. I love faces. I love eyes. Eyes are probably my favorite thing to draw or paint. I think there’s so much you can show with the eyes and then with the expression of the face – that’s just a bonus.
My mom lost her mother when she was young. I never met my grandmother. Then my mother’s father – my grandfather – passed away in 2018 from pancreatic cancer. She didn’t have a lot of pictures of them together as younger adults, so I wanted to create a piece for my mother so that she would have some sort of memory of them together in their twenties.
I just worked with purple, orange, and green. My grandmother was in green and my grandfather in orange. It was a piece entirely dedicated to my mother. The song by the Beatles, “Things We Said Today,” [my grandfather] sang it to her before he went to college. Those are the words in the background of the painting.
I know this piece means a lot to my mother. It’s in my bedroom right now. I finished it in 2020. My mom hasn’t seen it in person yet, but she has seen it on FaceTime. She’s in India now.
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. I never really thought of it as a profession until I was in the ninth grade when I fell in love with my art teacher and how she worked with her students. Initially, when I came to Goshen College, I only majored in art, but I figured if I were also able to teach art, I would be able to do two things that I love, and it wouldn’t feel too much like work.
When I was in India, and I first told a college counselor I wanted to pursue art as a profession, she told me it wasn’t a respectable career and that I should switch to something more practical. I knew then that if I were going to study art, I would need to do that abroad.
I’m so glad I came to Goshen because I got the best art education.
Goshen isn’t what I was expecting it to be, but I love that art is so integrated into the culture here. You can find art everywhere – in an alley or the cafes like the Electric Brew and how they do the Art Walk in Elkhart. There wouldn’t have been opportunities like that at home.
I love how supported the arts are in Goshen. I feel like there are a lot of opportunities to get involved with the artist community outside of college and high school.”
