“Show up and work. Honestly, I hate hearing, ‘You’re so talented!’ No, I have put in so many hours to get to this point. People that are doing really good work are always working on it. They’re not talking about it; they’re doing it.”

“There’s something so valuable, especially something made out of a baby’s clothes, or a blanket, or I’ve got somebody just sent me it is some old clothes of her grandfather’s and she’s having me make a doll for her grandmother. That’s something you can't just buy.”

“I get inspired by people who are living their dreams and passions. And are living life fully, those who are not forgetting to have life in their years.”

“It also can be scary as f*ck, you know, because when you really put yourself out there in an artform, people are so opinionated. Just like with owning a restaurant is super scary. Because people are so opinionated about food. Nobody likes to be judged negatively.”

“More than anything, if I could ask anything of a viewer, is just that they would walk away intrigued by a dialogue that I had started. That they would keep processing whatever it meant to them and find hope or meaning or more questions.

“I think I would go crazy if I wasn’t creative. I enjoy making things and putting things together. I think actually, I might think a little different as in when I make a piece I don’t think I’m creating it. I look at a piece as more of a puzzle”

“The whole reason that I love to bake so much is I love the joy and happiness it brings to people when they have something they really enjoy and can make their day a little better.”

“I don’t think people realize that the paintings that are presented to the public are the ones that have risen to the top. There is a lot of work that people don’t see. A lot of effort that people don’t see because the pieces have been covered up, they’ve been thrown away, they’ve been shredded, burned.”

“I think it’s the option or ability to offer somebody something that they can’t get somewhere else or they haven’t seen somewhere else. Bringing something new into somebody’s house that has a story to tell. There’s a meaning behind everything we do.“

“For any artistic career, prepare to be broke, because the starving artist is no joke, that is a true statement. And prepare to die doing your work. I don’t have a retirement plan. There’s no endgame here, it’s go until you can go no more.”

“I didn’t have one art class growing up, but what we grew up with was a lot of freedom, a lot of time on our hands, and access to materials. My dad had piles metal and wood all over the place and us kids with no supervision, we built a lot of things and explored a lot and I think that, for me, was creativity training.”

“I'm just hoping to take this little thing that I know how to do, this visual language I speak, to put something good back into the world for myself and in service of others. It's my hope that we begin to take a deeper responsibility for each other and our impact on each other all while laughing, smiling, and having fun in our short time here together.”