My pet potraiture series is really an example of stumbling into a shoe that fits. I remember in my senior seminar class hearing a professor talk about the inevitable necessity of art school graduates needing to make extra cash by painting "your aunt Ida's pet Fefe" (insert contemptuous, sarcasm between parenthesis). That very moment my heart welled up with desire to paint Bella and Indi, the Thompson's beloved pups, for a wedding gift. So I did, and word spread, and here I am painting the pets of folks far and wide. It makes sense. It's not the glameriously aloof, intimidatingly erudite or untouchibly sophisticated parts of us that lead us to communicate to our poodles and schnowsers and our mixed breed rescue cases in baby talk. Those kinds of responses get closer to our soft gooey centers, the places that gush out honest definitions for what it means to be human