Being an artist isn’t something you choose, it’s who you are & I took the long route to discover you can’t be someone else even if you try. After receiving my four-year degree in visual art, I went on to receive a masters degree in Consumer & Retail Studies and then worked a variety of jobs. All this brought me right back to where I started as a child: painting. The uncertainty of art as a career scared me, but I could no longer deny that this is my calling so, in faith, I walked away from the career path I had followed from furniture to linens to boutique wholesale and started HighBrow Hippie in the fall of 2016. I had fallen in love with watercolor in art school & it felt like coming home to pick up those brushes again. I love this medium because of its wildness- the tension of suspended pigment in water; the balance of control & chaos. To me, watercolor is gracefulness, faith & boldness in one. It’s both how I paint & how I want to live.

I was diagnosed with brain cancer in September, 2021. My expectation was that I would be cancer-free and totally recovered within a year. But no one anticipated that the treatments were going to cause brain damage, endless seizures and extreme fatigue. I’m writing this in September, 2023 and I have a lot of days where full recovery seems lightyears away. It’s been trying but I’ve always had hope; not a grasping, shaky “hopefully this will all work out” but a bold, solid hope. God’s love, goodness & wisdom is the foundation of that hope that cannot be shaken.

Why ‘HighBrow Hippie’? Well, to sum it up, I’m a questioner of the status quo but also a lover of tradition; a free spirit but also a sheet snob. Authenticity is important to me- loving things truly for their own sake, not for the image they create or the box they help you fit within. It’s not bucking the trends or fitting right in, HighBrow Hippie is about the authentic juxtapositions of the things that call to your soul: classic, modern, highbrow, lowbrow, whatever they may be- it’s beauty for beauty’s sake.