The first artist I ever met was my grandmother. My grandparents' apartment was full of her drawings, paintings and pottery. She never agreed to buy me the dresses I liked because she could make them better herself (and did). As a child, I spent the weekends scampering through the Detroit Institute of Arts like it was a playground because that's one of the places where she and my grandfather liked to hang out and meet with friends. So I guess you could say I grew up with a deep appreciation of the arts and creative people from a very young age.
Perhaps it was because my grandmother was my earliest definition of what it meant to be an artist that I didn't really consider myself as one for a very long time. I never got very strong as a visual artist and I thought you had to see art for it to be art. Yet I realized in my early twenties (with the help of my friends and Burning Man) that life itself is art. The freedom to create and express yourself is an inalienable gift that comes with just being alive. And while my creations aren't often things you can touch or see, they are still true crafts and forms of expression that you can feel, think about, and experience.
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