Home is? Charlton, MA. I don’t like it very much there. It’s a sleepy cow town. I was born in Amherst, NY.
What are you most passionate about? Writing. I don’t get a lot of opportunity to do it during the school year. When I was younger I didn’t think it would be so lucrative and I have a difficulty reading so I went into design and art instead, but I want to go back to it in grad school. I actually write fan-fiction more regularly than anything else, but most recently I had a ten minute play submitted to a competition.
Who has influenced you? Duchamp. I know that’s cliché but the story of his urinal piece gets me every time. I want to make art like that. It makes people angry, it makes the night shift guy wonder, and most importantly, is it art?
What do you feel in your gut drives you the most? I like being able to break and make the rules to my own standards. If I feel like something I am doing will make people ask questions, or make them have strong opinions, I will probably do it. I recently had a photo win a submission contest, and every time my mother looks at it she says ‘I don’t like that’ and that’s what drives me.
Why art? Originally, I didn’t pick art. I was in middle school and I wanted to write my own novel. I did research on how to get published and found out the writer had little to no control on what the cover looked like and that was unacceptable to me. In high school I took design and I stuck with it into college. I still have my original book idea, and it will get published, but it’s on the back burner. Art picked me up by the ankles and shook what I thought I knew out of me and now I’m here for good, more or less.
When creating, what is the message you are trying to convey? I hope to convey that I don’t like being told what’s good for me and I don’t like being modest. Also that you should be paying me.
Do you ever face any difficulties when trying to create? All the time. Especially in design, my biggest difficulty is not living up to the expectations people have of me. My skill is not really in design, it’s in having ideas about design. Implementing and making those ideas is where I run into trouble, I always need someone to tell me I’m doing okay, and that my design isn’t that bad.
What are your goals as an artist? As an artist? I can’t be certain. Can I answer that way? I don’t know. I really don’t. Career wise, I want to be an Art Director at some ad agency in NYC. But art wise, I live that day-to-day. My next project is postcards in and around Boston, but beyond that, I haven’t got a clue.
What do you define as beautiful? I do not define beauty.