Jacob Aguiar

About the artist

I have been an artist my entire life. I can remember as a kid staying up until midnight drawing comic book characters with friends or sitting in the car while my parents had to run errands so I could draw what I saw out the window. An avid lover of the outdoors from an early age, my favorite activities as a child included playing hide and seek and building forts in my friends' woods in rural Kansas. It wasn't until 2011 that my love of art and my love of nature found each other. Burned out in naturopathic medical school, I took a leave of absence my third year of school to spend time with family and to pursue art. I spent that year in the small Northern California town of Sebastopol. It didn't take long before I realized I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful landscapes in America. At that point, I really had no direction, debating whether I should try watercolor, pen and ink drawing, oils or one of the many other media out there. I was searching the internet for inspiration and direction when I stumbled across the landscape pastels of Richard McKinley...needless to say, I was hooked immediately. Not only were his paintings incredibly beautiful, he had found a way to combine media in such a creative way. I immediately purchased my first set of Rembrandt pastels, and began my journey of capturing the beauty of the natural world with these little sticks of pigment.