My Art Story: Coming Home to Color

My Art Story: Coming Home to Color

Some people discover art.
Others remember it.

For me, art has always felt like something I already knew—like a language I spoke before I ever learned the words.

As a child, I was drawn to color, to texture, to the quiet magic of creating something out of nothing. I loved how art let me express what I couldn’t always say. It was freedom. It was play. It was wonder.

By middle school and high school, art wasn’t just something I liked—it was part of who I was. I took art every single year. I experimented with everything: acrylics, charcoal, drawing, ceramics. I even developed my own technique in ceramics, obsessed with pushing the medium beyond what I was being taught.

The First Time I Ever Sold Art

In high school, I entered a beauty pageant.

The problem? I didn’t have a “talent.”

No singing.
No dancing.
No baton twirling.

So I did the only thing that felt true.

I brought my art.

I set up my pieces on stage and walked the judges through each one—why I made it, what inspired it, what it meant to me. I told the stories behind the colors and textures. I shared what creating them felt like.

After the show, one of the judges—an actress—came up to me.

She bought one of my paintings.

That was the very first time I ever sold my art.

I didn’t realize it then, but that moment planted a seed that would take decades to fully bloom:
My voice, my story, and my art belong together.

When the World Said Yes

My senior year of high school, I won an art scholarship—and my work was featured in my own gallery in Las Vegas. I was just a kid, standing in a real gallery, seeing my name on the wall.

It felt surreal. Like the world was saying, Yes. This is real. You belong here.

So I followed that path and majored in art in college. I studied charcoal, printmaking, drawing, painting—every discipline I could get my hands on. I loved every minute of it. The smell of paper. The mess of paint. The way time disappeared when I was creating.

But there was one problem.

I didn’t know how to make a living from it.

I loved art deeply… but I didn’t know how art loved me back.

The Long Pause

Life moved fast. I got married. I had kids. I became a teacher. Practicality took over. Responsibility took over. And like so many creative people, I told myself I’d “get back to it someday.”

I never stopped loving art.
I just stopped choosing it.

Even then, it found its way into my life. I did photography on the side to help make ends meet. It was still creative, still expressive—just quieter. More hidden. Something I did for others, not fully for myself.

Years passed.

2026: The Return

And then something shifted.

In 2026, I made a promise to myself:
This is the year I come back.

Not to hustle.
Not to prove anything.
Not to be perfect.

Just to create again.

I entered my first art contest in years at Red Cliffs Gallery in St. George, Utah—with a piece of my photography.

And I won an Honorable Mention.

It wasn’t about the award.

It was about the feeling.

Standing there, I felt like that high school girl again. The one who believed art mattered. The one who felt alive when she created. The one who didn’t need permission to be an artist.

This Is My Homecoming

This time, I’m not waiting for someday.

This time, I’m building a life where art isn’t squeezed into the corners—it’s centered.

My work now is a blend of everything I’ve been:
Watercolor. Photography. Mixed media. Memory. Place. Story. Healing.

Art, to me, is no longer about talent.
It’s about remembering who you are.

This website, this blog, this body of work—it’s my homecoming.

To color.
To creativity.
To the part of me that never left, even when I thought she did.

If you’re here reading this, maybe you’re on your own creative return.

And if so, let me say this:

You don’t have to start over.
You just have to come back.