Could you please give us a brief history of where you grew up and how you got started as an artist? I grew up in NYC right across the park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My parents dragged me there as a child. I can clearly remember my first Monet retrospective when I was about ten and how amazed I was by it. In high school, we had few resources or perhaps the school didn’t value art education. So, our art teacher made us endlessly draw a house plant, its negative spaces etc. There was a whole movement in school to kill the plant so that we could stop drawing it.