For as long as I can remember I’ve always had a fascination with animals, big and small. It didn’t matter if it were a cow in a pasture, a common crow on a fence, or a fish in a local pond. Growing up in Dallas never allowed me the opportunity to observe any wild animals, apart from the occasional whitetail deer in the rural suburbs. So you can imagine how incredible I always found it when my family would go on vacations to places with actual wildlife.

Art was never something I pursued when I was young. Like most kids, I really excelled at stick figures and tracing my own hand. It wasn’t until I was 23 years old and working off the coast of Washington on an oil tanker that I decided to pick up a pencil and paper again out of pure boredom. To my surprise, I was doing better than stick figures this time. Using a reference photo from the internet, I sketched out a bull elk. Not being convinced I was the one to create that sketch, I did another, and another, each one better than the last. That was the day I realized this is something worth diving into. I needed to know where the ceiling was to this newly discovered skill.

Now, years later, I’m currently living in Flagstaff, AZ and I’m still looking for that ceiling. My lifelong love for wildlife has always been the driving force of inspiration to all the drawings I’ve done. I’m obsessed with capturing what I feel like are the personalities and essences of all the animals that I’ve chosen to draw. Every animal has made me feel some sort of way and I try to depict what those feelings are in my drawings, with hopes that you might feel that too.