Hello there, Nice to meet you!
I am a creative human.
You are a creative human.
Let’s Chat!
I want to share my journey with you so you know where I come from and the reason art is so intrinsic to my life.
To be honest, I never know how to start these things. I always end up sounding like someone else instead of me. Maybe, I need to set the scene. I’m currently writing this at my little desktop desk in my room on a Sunday morning, I have a half full cup of coffee that I will most likely replenish before it hits empty and Jurassic World is playing on my phone in the background. Why Jurassic World? I decided to have a Jurassic Park Marathon this weekend while I was painting and working on my new collection. Those 90’s movies are the best, amirite?!
In a nutshell this is me, your embracer.
I’m usually doing more than one thing at a time which is both fantastic and also problematic at times. Before I got here, to this desk, writing this blog post, I went to school for Art History. Not art? Nope. I did one semester for a Bachelor of Fine Arts and at the time, 18 year old Dani was by no means confident enough to put herself out there and declare her creativity worthy of the worlds’ eyes. To go through critique after critique each week was daunting. Instead, I fell in love with Art History, learning about the art I have admired and the context in which they were made has and always will fascinate me.
Similar to a majority of people who graduate from their first four years of college…
I had no idea what I was doing after, so I enrolled in graduate school. I had amazing opportunities in my Master’s program and throughout my three years I was able intern in galleries and art studios in and around New York City. It was an incredibly exciting time, as well as, terrifying. Alongside beginning to build my resume as a 22 years old I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This led me to finding the therapist I still have today and discovering that most of my worries in life don’t have to be worries at all. Both externally and internally my world was changing, but in retrospect it is kind of amazing, everything humans can accomplish even when we are in the thick of it, when we are trying to understand ourselves, and when we slowly uncover the key to help us continue to evolve.
Early adulthood is a wild ride.
Despite majoring in Art History my creativity has always been with me along the way. I minored in Photography which exposed me, on a much smaller scale, to those critiques I found daunting. Photography was my passion all throughout college, I always had my DSLR on me and had the most incredible professors that truly showed me the power of an image. However, as time passed and grad school was underway I found myself longing for pencils, paper, color, paint, messes.
I missed using my hands to create.
In the midst of grad school, I began painting again. Landscapes. All of these have been archived at this point but they were where I found my love of color. The more landscapes I painted the looser they became and the more I wanted to focus on the relationships of color. Slowly the mountains and trees gave way to mixing multiple variations of greens to see what happens when you put them on a canvas together. I no longer felt confined to representation and these paintings could represent my own personal reflections. What I was experiencing found itself directly on the canvas.
Shortly after grad school, in 2018,
I came up with the name
Embracing Obsession.
I wanted to take all I had experienced learning about my own mind and put it on the canvas. While my thoughts are no different from anyone else the emphasis I put on certain thoughts causes anxiety, obsession, and fear. Mostly, fear of the unknown. This is the part of OCD that I believe goes unseen by most and it is the part I wanted to address in my paintings. I want the canvas to be a place I could put that fear and let it exist outside of myself.
Now, I continue on my path as artist and poet
You may have noticed I haven’t spoken about poetry as much in this retelling of my life. This is because I honestly don’t know when I began writing. Writing has been with me probably before art. Growing up I always had a journal, always had a planner. I would write and write and write; I always had poetry strewn across the pages. I’ve performed at the Bowery Poetry Club and won a Spoken Word contest in college but it was always a hobby, until 2020. The isolation of COVID-19 allowed me to write and edit and work on my poetry in ways I probably never would have had if not given the time.
My life is now filled with a beautiful community of creative artists and I continue to develop and evolve my craft and as a person. I continue to learn something new about myself everyday and within that something new about my own capacity for creativity.
Welcome to my life as
artist, poet, and embracer.
I am so glad you’re here with me.
