Being born in the United States and having Romanian be my first language was always an odd problem for me. It was hard for me to fit into most groups, especially in school. My only outlet to express how I felt about this was through drawing and painting. I’ve always enjoyed doing it. Since I was a little kid I’ve always had a fascination for the arts. As a child, I fondly recall going to a museum or a gallery and seeing all of the masterful works done by others or taking classes at school and private ones as well. The arts have always been a part of me. My father, who is musically inclined, taught me the basics in drawing when I was the age of four: perspective, the human form, and how to draw wheels properly. He was and still is a big inspiration of mine: helping me come up with new ways to strengthen the messages I want to convey with my pieces. Recently I have been inspired by the Fauvist movement, by artists like Matisse and Chagall, who have influenced most of my recent paintings, which comprise of nude figures positioned in graceful sedentary poses, lounging in the lush, velveteen depths of my mind. I have also been greatly inspired by the new movement of Metamodernism, which has me working on a series of large-scale paintings depicting the old decrepit communist buildings in Romania floating away in a still crumbling state of reassurance that time has passed on to become history and is now a mere memory. I’ve always loved museums. When I lived in Pittsburgh, my birth city where my family and I lived in the neighborhood of Oakland, the preschool I attended would take the group of us children to the Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts every week, and every time I was just so amazed. Being that little and having such a wonderful chance of seeing all the works at the museum left a profound impact on me. I guess I could say that the preschool had the greatest impact in forming my artistic interests. Art is something — no, more than something — it is a way of realizing the world and I want to have the chance of strengthening my ability to see. And with this strengthened vision, I want to help others see the world in new ways through the publication of books on the topic of art theory and through my own pieces.