"What we play is life."
– Louis Armstrong
I am a CREATIVE.
I am an ARTIST.
I am a MUSICIAN.
I am an ARTISAN.
All my life I have wanted to be active with my hands. A desire to take my thoughts, my feelings, my knowledge, and produce it into the world around me. A realization that I can shift the environment of a room, by a single stroke, a single note.
I never felt like anything came easy to me. I always seemed to work ten times harder and ten times longer than everyone else. When I was 9, I discovered I had dyslexia, and began learning how to work with my dyslexia rather than struggle against it.
Though I had to still work harder and longer than most, it slowly got easier; and I used my ability to see the world differently to my advantage. When I was learning scales and chords, instead of struggling to memorize things (like I was physically watching a film) I saw a piano playing that said scale or chord. When I was learning to shade a circle into a sphere, in my mind’s eye I could physically see the 3D shape and move around it.
But fear, doubt, and shame still ruled my life. I could never be enough. I could never achieve what I dreamed of. In my senior year of high school, I was in the top concert band, jazz band, and symphony, and I still struggled with feeling like I was a fraud and not good enough. This was all until I spent my first year as an adult, in a ministry school, learning who I was and whose I was.
Love, hope, and truth flooded into my life. From then on, all I wanted was to help bring that same freedom to the world. A transformation of the heart and mind.
If you want to know my artist statement, follow this button to read it.
