What goes around...comes around.

I have always drawn, for as long as I can remember. I was also always known as the 'artist' in the class when I was in school. Keep in mind that coming from a very small town (population 249), the odds were against there even being two 'artists'. Even so, it instilled in me a lifelong interest in art and sparked the desire to always be known as 'the artist' wherever I went.

I also have kept with me from when I was a child, the burning desire to get a pleasant reaction from people regarding my artwork. A very vivid memory for me comes from seeing some sort of Health nurse when I was four. She had asked me, as I sat next to my mom, to draw a picture of a random person on a small rectangle of yellow paper. Looking back on it, this nurse must have been seeking fodder for a conversation about the human body with a child. But at the time, all I knew to do was grab a red crayon and make a stick man. Little did I know that this wasn't to be any old stick man. I still remember the positive and surprised reaction to the drawing that it garnered. I'll never forget how warm I felt having created this feeling in another. Of course, this particular nurse has no idea about how cataclysmic this meeting was. The rest is personal history.

In the more recent present, I had, at the risk of sounding too Oprah-esque, a full circle moment in art. An artist's collaborative known as Artx9 had just invited me to be part of their group, having first seen some artwork of mine on display almost 20 years earlier. I was a teenager at the time of that first encounter, and had just spent a year shouldered by the local artist-in-residence. As a young teen, I had been mentored by an artist, and here I was as an adult, seeing the bigger picture of all that that experience had given to me and was still giving. I realized that at that moment, I had to create an opportunity to give back. A few months later, I had created the prairie chapter of Gareau Tosh Studios and had three young students under my wing. There was no doubt in my mind of what this meant for them, but also for me.

With this said, I know I will always paint and draw, either for myself or for others. Until I am old and gray, this is what I vow, and hope, to do.