Terp Derbs (Jon Clare) While art was a passion throughout my life, I have been transformed from an appreciator and dabbler to an artist thanks to digital illustration. As a child I liked to draw, but poor motor skills prevented my serious pursuit of art as a career. The digital medium allows me to create and refine – using various smoothing and blending techniques -- until the picture in my head comes alive. In college, I began to take more advanced art classes and branched into digital techniques. I gained an interest in in visionary spiritual art as well as modern contemporary abstract art. When researching these types of artists (especially Alex Grey and Wassily Kandinsky) I realized the power visionary art has in helping me to convey meaning to my thoughts in addition to the pure objective beauty in the expression of abstract art. Incorporating heavily blended dramatic color gradients to create surreal compositions with juxtapositions of unique colors and shapes helps me to convey a unique view of an idea. Some of my interests include space science spirituality and nature but have a thirst for knowledge and learning new things. I was completing my college degree pre-pandemic and hope to get back to inperson learning this fall. In the meantime, I am combining my other passion -- sewing -- to try and commercialize my art though Redbubble, Etsy, and other online channels.