HopelessMoonBoutique

I’ve been fascinated and immersed in art all my life. My earliest memories of my journey start in elementary school. At home I was a voracious comic book reader. I’d get lost in my brother’s Spider-Man comics, we read Marvel primarily with the exception of Batman and Superman on the DC side. My favorite superhero to this day is Peter Parker. Back in the 90s, there was a comic book shop in North Miami called Tropic Comics. My grandmother would take us there on Wednesdays to pick up the new comic releases. Sometimes I didn’t even understand the comics I bought, I just knew that I loved the artwork and the illustrations, so I would use those books as drawing references for my own sketches. I admired the artwork of the legendary John Romita Jr., J. Scott Campbell, and Stefano Caselli. In school, I really liked the library and got in the habit of checking out the arts and culinary books and being excited about the book fairs. I had two pet fish: Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh aptly named after my two favorites at that age.

In 5th grade, my art teacher took notice of my creative gifts and she suggested that I audition to Parkway Middle, the performing arts school in Fort Lauderdale. She felt that I would do well in their visual arts program. In 2000 at 11 years old, I got accepted into parkway after a successful audition. After completing their arts program, I stayed focused on art throughout high school in my AP art classes. In high school, I also fell in love with dramatic and language arts, and started to divide my time between creative writing, playwriting, drama class/club, and art class/club. I started as the makeup artist for the cast and eventually became part of the cast and started performing in school plays. I would also write my own short plays inspired by my weekend Blockbuster hauls and we’d perform them in my drama class.

I stayed with art throughout college at Broward College, but I was in deep in love with cinema and literature by the time I started FIU in 2012 – so much that I switched my major from Visual Arts to English Literature and enrolled in their film studies program. I graduated FIU in 2015 with my Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and spent the next few years as a contributing writer on movie websites and an occasional volunteer in film, primarily horror films.

I kept up with my art somewhat during film school and would occasionally submit pieces to local art shows, but my passion for movies and writing overpowered my art at that time and art took a back seat for a while. I also started getting involved in professional wrestling during college. I’m a lifelong wrestling fan, and in 2010 I started getting involved in backyard wrestling and going to independent wrestling shows in Miami. Eventually I started getting involved as a volunteer. I saw volunteering as an outlet for my theater background, as there are a lot of similarities between the wrestling and dramatic arts. My experiences navigating through the wrestling subculture have provided me with an overwhelming amount of inspiring lessons, great memories and opportunities that I’m forever grateful for.

Fast forward to the fall of 2022: I’m starting to get back on my feet after a lengthy unemployment period due to the pandemic. I was a part time wrestling and variety streamer on Twitch at this time, and I was transitioning back into working a 9-5 office job after relying on streaming full time for so long. I was also losing interest in live streaming. I felt restricted in how I could express the depths of my authentic self and was starting to grow frustrated from the understimulation when I knew that I had more passions inside me to express in the right ways. I naturally gravitated towards my sketchbook and started working on some exercises to get back into the flow of sketching which led to me gaining the confidence to go straight into working with oil paints. The day that I started working in my sketchbook was pretty much the day that I committed to the role I studied my entire life to rightfully call myself: an artist. It’s wild how things come back around full circle, huh?