Basics
Well, what can I say? I was born in Louisiana but spent the majority of the first 25ish years of my life in Clarksville, Tennessee. I am now a resident of Seattle, Washington, but the south has touched me, has altered me, in ways I have only recently begun to understand.
By trade, I am a north Pacific fisheries observer - I monitor fishing activities at sea. By training, I am primarily a painter with a smattering of traditional and digital experience, who can also conduct scientific research.
I write poems, dabble in various aspects of "computer magic", and partake in various forms of naturalism. Everywhere new I go, I have to bird. I spend a large part of my year at sea, out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where I am birding constantly. When I am home (and occasionally while in any combination of far-off boat or bunkhouse) I cook, too, not too extravagantly, but it is as much for my nourishment as my pleasure and experimentation. I derive a lot of enjoyment from making American food with Asian elements - how can I make X dish with Y spices, how can I make a savory "japanese waffle"?
Really, everything I do is some kind of experimentation in how much fun I can have with the resources I am given.
Education
I was homeschooled until 8th grade, when I attended public middle school. I attended one year of public high school before attending a private school, where I graduated as Valedictorian of my class in 2011. I attended Austin Peay University for college, where I obtained a B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Studio Art in 2016. I then returned to APSU for my M.S. thesis, graduating in 2020. This most recent academic step involved identifcation of a vast army of small freshwater invertebrates, GIS analyses, bioassessment, and ascertaining the presence of a small, brown songbird: the Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla, for those so inclined).
It was great fun becoming skilled at the various processes inherent to ecological assessment, and I feel like I have so much more to learn about this and the other fields I enjoy. A return to school is perpetually on the table.
What I'm Doing
You've noticed that I admit to doing so much of this because it's fun, no? It's because there are so many things I love, and I express my love by finding things out about them. That act of discovery is fun to me. In both my creative and scientific bodies of work, I deign to illustrate relationships and their qualia. Whether I am illustrating community-level ecology of small streams or examining a state of being outside the scope of scientific inquiry, the lexicon of all that I have studied pervades itself. My science is an art as much as my art is a science.