My name is Jadyn Fowler, and I’m a 26 year old self-taught artist. I’ve always been naturally drawn to creating—any school T-shirt design contest, pottery class, weaving club—you name it and I was there. Art was never something I considered a hobby, but rather a constant. Still, for a long time, I didn’t consider myself an “artist.” Maybe it was the imposter syndrome, or the idea that art had to meet certain standards—probably both.

It wasn't until recently that I began taking my art seriously and realized that creativity itself is what makes someone an artist. I’ve explored nearly every creative outlet I could get my hands on—from painting custom shoes, crocheting blankets, embroidering clothes, tattooing myself and others, painting murals, and more, to landing in my professional role as a Marketing Director and Graphic Designer. I find I’ve shifted through mediums as I’ve shifted through different phases of life, and as an adult, I have grown a deep appreciation for fine art and large scale work. I love practicing different styles, but I’m often drawn to realism, surrealism, landscapes and portraiture.

Art has always been my escape from the noise of the outside world and into myself. The process of creating is its own kind of therapy: quiet, grounding, and sometimes emotional. I’ve cried at my easel, laughed, zoned out to music, got lost in an audiobook—the list goes on, but one thing remains true—I meet the most raw version of myself when I’m creating. It’s like meeting myself again and continuously learning more about who I am and how I can challenge myself to see the world from a new perspective.

Every piece I make carries a part of me, not always in meaning, but in its making. The time I spent at the easel—the songs I listened to, the mood I was in, the toy my dog was squeaking, the emotions I was processing all live within my work. Every brushstroke marks a moment, and the process itself becomes just as meaningful to me as the finished piece.

What I love most about art is how subjective it is. A single piece can hold a story I poured into it, yet be seen in completely different ways by everyone who encounters it. Our experiences shape our perception and that’s what makes it so special—two people can look at the same piece and hold two entirely different truths. Even the same person can come back years later and feel something new, because we change, and art changes with us.

Sonder noun. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. (via the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Every work of art connects the separate worlds of those who view it, even if for just one moment. Art is not my hobby—the connection it creates? That always will be.

xoxo, Jadyn