"Guardians of the Past" Painting

I was born in Italy and immigrated to Canada with my family when I was three. For the next twenty years, I loved looking at art — but never imagined I could be an artist myself.
After graduating high school, I planned a short two-month trip to Europe before attending Teachers College. Those two months turned into two years of travelling around the world. When I finally returned to Canada, I completed my studies and became a teacher.
My first teaching position took me to Lima, Peru, where I worked at Markham College, a private British boys’ school. While there, I began taking drawing classes with renowned Peruvian sculptor Cristina Gálvez. Over the course of a single year, she changed the course of my life — inspiring me to leave teaching and pursue art full-time.
When I returned to Canada, I enrolled in art school and studied Visual Arts for four years. Like many artists, I quickly learned how challenging it can be to make a living from one’s work — but I was determined. My love of travel continued to guide my path, taking me back to Peru for solo exhibitions and later to New Mexico, where I studied for six months in the M.A. Studio Arts program at the University of New Mexico.
A year later, I completed my M.A. at NYU and remained in New York for four more years to pursue my Doctorate in Education — all while painting and exhibiting whenever possible.
For the past twenty years, I have taught high school, painting on weekends and showing my work when I could. But everything changed during COVID. One day, I walked into my empty car garage, and something came over me. Leaning against the wall was an 80” x 20” half inch sheet of plywood. I instinctively picked it up and began to paint — and that first painting became the beginning of a series of sixty works I now call The Old Ones, inspired by a dream I had long ago in New Mexico.
Since that day, I haven’t stopped painting.