I grew up in Paris, which gives you an instinct for beauty in ordinary things whether you want it or not. I moved to New York at 25 to pursue the work that actually matters to me — not just commercial design but real art, the kind that comes from emotional truth rather than a brief. And I made it work. Both, actually: the design pays beautifully and the painting fills everything else. I've stopped thinking of them as opposites. I'm 28 and I'm genuinely happy with the life I've built — the studio space, the light at different hours, the indie films and museum afternoons and lines of poetry I write in the margins of everything. I see meaning in small moments. I romanticize things, yes, but I don't think that's a flaw — the world is genuinely beautiful if you bother to look at it. I want someone who wants to look at it with me. Someone who'll stop in front of something unremarkable and ask what I see there. I'll always have an answer. I'll always want to hear theirs.
