Why they do what they do

We asked some of the city’s leading artists and creatives to tell us about how they decided to pursue an artistic or creative career. We’ve shared some highlights below.
I was raised in a musical home where education of all subjects was just as important as our creative classes and extracurricular activities. I’ve always loved to create and knew I would go to study some sort of design at college. I chose to study graphic design at Brigham Young University. I loved it so much! It was the perfect degree to learn how to visually communicate everything! I focused most of my time on web and app development with a few fun classes on other topics of design. Towards the end of my bachelors degree I took a textiles class and it reminded me how much I loved the hands on process that went into making the final textile product whether it was clothes, bedding, or home decor. Read more>>
I was drawn to be a professional artist at a fairly young age. While I had always been quite creative and imaginative (performing self-produced puppet shows, creating elaborate soap operas with my action figures, drawing huge scrolling panoramic stories on entire legal pads), it was in seventh grade when I found myself drawn so strongly to theatre. I was attending a school performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to see a friend in the show, and right then and there I fell in love with live performance. The next year I auditioned for the school play and from there on out I was very active in the theatre department. Read more>>
I wanted to push the boundaries of what a typical artist looks like. As children we are taught that an artist must be good at drawing or really good at painting a canvas, these are the stereotypes that comes along with the label of “artist”. I had a passion for art but I was also just as passionate about mechanical technology as well as computer technology. I pursued all three by unconventional means of hands on trial and error. I even declared myself an artist before I was ever actually an “artist”. My young naïve confidence allowed me to fail without giving up. I had a strong desire to build things that have never been made before, and that desire has only become more complex. Read more>>
I decided to pursue a creative career because it was something that always made me happy. As a little kid I would be doing all types of creative things whether it be drawings, or paintings I always always doing something creatively and it made me happy, the number one thing that I loved doing was photography. I would always be the one taking photos on the old family family camera of our road trips, of nature etc. As I got older I decided to pursue my interests that I had as a child, and it got me many places I could’ve never imagined. Read more>>