About

THE ARTIST

I have been drawing since I was able to hold a pencil.

As a child, my drawings mostly consisted of fairies, mermaids, fantasy worlds, and (you guessed it) horses. I saved up birthday and Christmas money to buy my first 48-count set of Prismacolor colored pencils at the age of ten, and treated them as a precious resource that had to be used judiciously.

Art classes were a near-annual presence in my pre-college education. I also took a drawing class in college. Despite that, I am primarily self-taught, and most of my high school and college art classes consisted of my instructor setting me free to draw whatever I wanted while they worked on technique with other students.

(I did, however, learn to stretch and prepare my own canvases in those art classes as a teenager, and consider that an invaluable component of my artistic education.)

Over the years I have taken my artwork from doodles in notebook margins to countless sketchbooks to giant sheets of butcher paper on the walls of the gallery in my high school’s art building. I have worked with markers and ink, colored pencils and pastels and charcoal, and can be convinced to break out the oil paints from time to time, but my preferred medium is graphite.

This site was born from years of creating drawings as gifts for family and friends, as well as for my own amusement. I’m excited to work with you to immortalize a beloved pet for yourself or a loved one in your life, and thus set my artwork loose into the world instead of allowing it to languish in my portfolio forever.

OUTSIDE THE ART

For the sake of the narrative, I wish I could say that drawing is my life, but that wouldn’t be true. I hold a CPA license and work in corporate finance, and spend the bulk of my free time pursuing my eventing dreams with my horse, Cooper. I also enjoy collecting books (and sometimes reading them) (those are two separate hobbies), writing, playing music (I play four instruments), and gaming (I love RuneScape, I clearly have never moved on from 2007).

BEHIND THE NAME

This site is named for my horse. Cooper is a coming eight-year-old off-the-track Thoroughbred whom I have owned since he was two. He’s named after one of my favorite fictional characters, George Cooper, and shown under the name Spymaster in honor of George’s position as the assistant spymaster of Tortall.

I maintain a blog chronicling (some of) our adventures under the headline Spymaster Equestrian. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to name this site at first, but then decided that I should keep with the theme that I had already established. Much of my drawing as a kid was driven by the dream of having my own horse, so it feels appropriate to name this home for my artwork after the horse who finally fulfilled that desire.

(No, Spymaster is not his Jockey Club name. I know some people say it’s bad luck to change them but that very much hasn’t stopped me. His current name suits him and his personality perfectly.)