Looking back, I can pretty clearly remember seeing a single painting on a family vacation down to Key West when I was 14 years old that thoroughly inspired me and undoubtedly changed my life.  The black silhouette of a drummer, symbols crashing, with vibrant color splatter paint emanating from black canvas background immediately caught my attention. It almost felt alive. I was captivated by the colors, the playful abstract streaks, the powerful black background, and the high-contrast, recognizable graphic; in some way, this piece of artwork spoke to me. It connected me to art in a way I had not yet experienced.

Fast-forward three months, my family just moved into a new house and the walls in my new bedroom were painted a light periwinkle purple (it was previously a baby girl’s room). Wanting to decorate my room, I somehow convinced my parents to let me paint part of my room black then splatter paint it with the six primary colors (they made sure I covered the ceilings and floors appropriately). Dancing around to the Rolling Stones, throwing paint at the wall, I fell in love with the artistic process and visual aesthetics of splatter painting.

After completing this first project, I set out to paint the remaining three walls in my bedroom. I first experimented with taping and painting a black and white checkerboard pattern then splatter painted the opposite color in center of each square. I then experimented with confining the abstract splatter painting by using a roll of paper to create a simple zig-zag stencils. On the final wall, in an attempt to recreate silhouetted images, I projected, traced, and cut two life size stencils of a soccer player and a freestyle skier that I used to define regions of space that would remain unpainted. I also hand taped a graffiti stencil of my name under the window. At this point Pandora was out of the box. I was meant to be a splatter painter.