How it all started
It didn’t take long to figure out that I was an artist when, at eight years old, I would ask my mother for sheet after sheet of printer paper to draw on. I drew on everything, had a hyper-fixation of dragons and mermaids, and then carried my passion for capturing the world around me into high school and college. Art has always been an escape, and I can always count on my pencil and paper to help bring me back to earth.
In high school, I began genuinely flourishing with my realism studies. I branched out into media such as oil and chalk pastels, began learning to paint, and saw my talent take leaps and bounds. Here, I discovered my favorite subjects -- other humans. I won Best in Show in the 2014 Rappahannock Regional Library Art Exhibit for my piece The Cellist, a realism piece of a young man playing the cello.
Shortly after this, I began my college studies at Christopher Newport University. There, I explored many facets of myself and took a detour from art into music before returning to art to finish my college career. In 2016, I dedicated my fine arts degree to studying photography in digital and film formats. Inspired, I began working on a series about tattooed individuals in the workforce, which ultimately became my senior thesis. I entered the CNU Senior Art Exhibition of 2018 with my portrait series of diptychs featuring a professional headshot juxtaposed with the same individual showing off their tattoo. I won Second Place with my piece Bank Teller: in the first image of the diptych, the individual smiled, and in the second, she showed off her inner lip tattoo that read “Veritas.”
In 2020, I began my journey as a graphic designer, first in career choice and now in personal practice. Had you asked fifteen-year-old me if I’d ever become a graphic designer, I would have insistently said no. I used to view graphic design as something other than art. I was not too fond of the idea of computers helping create and was set in my opinion that it detracted from “proper” creative forms. I’m thankful to discover how wrong I was, and what used to be a feared opponent is now a welcomed ally in my journey to continue making art.
Since becoming an artist, I’ve searched for ways to communicate beauty and truth to people. Becoming a graphic designer has opened my eyes to a new realm of the creative world, a realm where I could push the boundaries of what is to create what could be. I love creating graphics because graphic design has become a beacon in our world. I believe it’s the most accessible and potent art form, with its complete saturation of the media and its power to inform and mislead. The versatility of graphic design is so vast that, for the first time in the art world, we see that anything and everything is possible.
“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” — Alberto Giacometti
May every one of your days be one in screaming color.
Yours truly,
R.C.P