“And Caroline, what would you like to be when you grow up?” My Kindergarten teacher spoke with a tone of condensation that you only understand when you are long graduated from the innocence of kindergarten. 'As if a 5-year old could really know his/her life path.'
“I want to be an artist.” I smile as I slap more paint on to the thick board that is starting to sag with my generous application of overly watery finger paint. The swirls of red, blue, and yellow are starting to morph from pretty purples to a down right disgusting gray-brown.
I don’t remember a reply and perhaps I didn’t get one, when my teacher saw how much promising talent I had. 'If you can’t say anything encouraging don’t say anything at all.'
Well, the silence didn’t stop me nor the lack of true artistic talent. 18 years later I am a graphic designer with two years of fine art training (tourtous as the first days of boot camp) as well three or so years experience in the graphic design field. Art has always been a hobby for me, something I didn’t really realize I could make a career out of until I found physics would collapse my bridge to architecture ambition taking down my pretty little dream of being the next Frank Lloyd Wright, right. I turned to what I knew and enjoyed but was never formally schooled in, art.
It was a natural transition as I have nearly 500 pages of wedding dress designs stored somewhere in the clutter of “Caroline’s” cabinet in my mother’s library in West Virginia. Art and weddings were married in my little brain at a very early age. So while my dream of being the next Vera Wang or Carolina Herrea didn’t come completely true I am totally satisfied with the road I traveled down that led me to be able to develop these inspiration boards on a humble blog buried in the mass quantity of other people realizing their long lost dreams. I was born and raised in the beautiful, inspirational Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, the state, no it's not a region of Virginia. My roots are deeply personal, as I feel my surroundings greatly shaped my life. Can you tell? I am bound by my soul to my family and friends. My family are my role models. I am terribly competitive and love sports. Basketball is my passion and hiking is my therapy. And I like to serve everything up with a nice side of quiet, dry humor.
