When I grad­u­ated high school 5 or 6 years ago I imme­di­ately reg­is­tered for col­lege and began my course work not more than a few weeks later. The tran­si­tion from ‘doe-eyed’ high school stu­dent to full-fledged col­lege stu­dent hap­pened in what seemed like a blink of the eye.

I noticed, after just a few days of being a col­lege stu­dent, that the atmos­phere and gen­eral work­flow was dif­fer­ent. The inter­ac­tion with fel­low stu­dents was easy, I’m not too shy to spark a con­ver­sa­tion, and most of the peo­ple I con­versed with noted my pas­sive atti­tude and quirky personality.

In a nut­shell I have a knack for what I call “sharp com­edy”, an indi­rect and com­pact ver­sion of what you would find at a com­edy club. I’m not sar­cas­tic, per say, but I do on occa­sion make witty remarks on cur­rent events, obser­va­tions, and other things to do with life. I also breath in the details of my sur­round­ings, which I believe is the result of my artis­tic background.

An artist will tell you that “it’s all in the details”, and for me what tran­spires is my innate abil­ity to rec­og­nize what might oth­er­wise be deemed super­nu­mer­ary, or the “smaller stuff”. For instance, when I’m scan­ning a col­lege cam­pus I make men­tal notes of where the trees are located, the area where stu­dents might gather the most and the gen­eral feng shui of the envi­ron­ment. In fact, that’s the best way to describe it, “feng shui” which accord­ing to the Chi­nese is the spirit influ­ences and flow attrib­uted to the nat­ural fea­tures of a landscape.

I also notice the details in peo­ple, which might be due to my tal­ent for por­trait art­work. When I look at a face I’ll notice the creases and crowfeet around the eyes, how one’s face might scrunch up when their focused or smooth out when they’re relaxed.

You might be think­ing, “Of course, this is all obvi­ous”, but for me I lit­er­ally take into account each indi­vid­ual fea­ture of a per­son and let it influ­ence my art­work. I’ll even make men­tal notes of how the per­son laughs; be it a hearty belly laugh or a “hyena” type laugh, every detail mat­ters in paint­ing an accu­rate por­trait of the individual.