TRYON | boontucket

I never really meant to pursue art. I have always been a creative person, but I never really took a chance to focus on it before. “Everyone is creative” I thought to myself. “Anytime I am not riding my bike, I am wasting my time” I might have said. I was always too busy pursuing extreme sports to focus on anything as sedentary as drawing. Now I look back and I can see myself being chased by the art reaper since my childhood. I remember how I loved when the Disneyland characters signed my signature book because I thought the signatures looked cooler than anything else. I remember designing a goofy custom t-shirt that listed all of the sports I played along with a little piece of colorful clip art to accompany each one.

I remember my grandma taking me to some art classes in the country where I would draw out of national geographic books with pastels. I got a bit older. I started taking pictures of the things I was doing (not drawing) and posting them on instagram. This is back when I told my friends, “you have to get on instagram!” and every one of them said, “what is instagram?”. I started designing websites and drawing on my bike shoes with sharpie paint markers. You see the point. It has been a long time coming and I never realized it. What clicked the switch?

Fall 2017. My semi-secret highschool crush comes back to visit her hometown where we went to highschool together. It had been many years and we had barely kept in touch. She tells me about her watercolor paintings and this weird channel on YouTube that she watches called Peter Draws. I watched some of those videos and they were extremely inspiring. There are people making weird art? All he needs is paper and a pen? Art doesn’t have to be a certain way? “ART IS ANYTHING YOU WANT IT TO BE!” I thought to myself. The only art I had ever been exposed to before were boring portraits, cliche splatter abstracts, and those really terrible paintings that my grandma swore were so beautiful hanging in her dining room.

I picked up a pen and started drawing on a legal pad from my dad’s office. I sat in my room for hours. My hand was sweating and my fingers hurt from gripping the pen too tightly. I filled the whole page with a doodle and displayed it to everyone within walking distance of my room.

I started dating my semi-secret highschool crush. We fell in love. She left to go back across the country and we started a long distance relationship.

January 2018. I pack up everything I own and put it into my Honda CRV. I tell everyone I love that I am moving away from my hometown of 23 years and across the country to live with my new girlfriend. Most of them think I am crazy, but all of them still love me anyways. I drove 2800 miles from Nevada to Connecticut and bought some big illegal fireworks (dream come true) on the way.

I moved in with my girlfriend and we started drawing together. She showed me her paintings. I didn’t know people spent so much time making art like that. She showed me all of her art supplies and took me to the local art store. It was the first time I had ever been in a real art store that wasn’t Hobby Lobby or Michaels. “What the hell is all of this stuff?” I remember thinking.

She showed me the artists she follows on instagram. I had been on instagram for years, but I had never seen any independent artist’s profiles or never payed attention to them if I did. I was hugely inspired.