Is this thing on?

The past few weeks, I've turned over the idea of creating a blog. What I would write about though, was fairly unclear. I asked my friends, my family, and got varied responses. "Write about photography.""Write about weird things that you see in New York.""Write about your feeeelings." After much thought on the matter, (or lack there of) I have decided that I will simply write about that which I know best. My life. Seems a bit shallow and boring, but I think it will be the most honest approach and will blend together all the best, and worst things that I encounter. Some blogs will be about art and maybe a few technical aspects to how I create mine. Some might be about street fashion, or gallery openings, or interviewing the man that sits outside the dorm talking to space aliens 24/7. Sometimes it will just be pictures. Those are worth a couple words, right?

However, before I get too ahead of myself, I feel it is best to start out at the beginning, with introductions. After all, I can't assume that you even know who I am. Not everyone reading this is some family member that was sent to this site via a million emails from my mother. Or from my Flickr. For all I know, you reading this could merely be some fatal stroke of fate.

So for those of you who don't know me, think you know me, or are of the persuasion to call me friend, let me do this properly. My name is Hannah Nicole Capra. I like to go by the name Twig, just because I can, and you're more apt to remember it. It's in fact a childhood nickname gleaned from the pages of an antique book about Faeries. My eight year old mind understood that real names mean nothing in comparison to the names we give ourselves. I think this is especially true today...and  I'm sure that Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta would agree.

I am an artist. Not just in the 'call myself an artist' sense, but in the 'pay an arm and a leg and a firstborn to attend art school in the northeast' artist. Currently, I am enrolled as a first year Photography major at the School of Visual Arts. It's in New York City. It's a pretty small place, you've probably never heard of it, they just have things like subways and a tiny thing call the Empire State Building. Which, I can see out my window right now. No big deal.

Three weeks prior to living here, my roots were planted in the red dirt of Abilene. For those of you unfamiliar with the middle of nowhere, that's located in Texas. It's a long way from New York, and has been my home for the past eighteen years. Abilene boasts 318 churches in the phonebook, and is the proverbial buckle of the Bible Belt. It was a good place to grow up in, but not the easiest place to stretch your wings (and don't even think about wearing black lipstick in public). Surprisingly, Abilene has a fairly active art scene, and I was able to show my work along with my mother out of our studio/gallery Twig & Willows for several years. It was also Abilene that introduced me to my first art teacher, Clint Hamilton, who ironically, was my connection to New York City. More to come later.

Although I do miss Texas, (and actually seeing the real sky, and breathing real air) New York is pretty great. There are loud sirens singing to me all night long. I can hear them right now actually, and it's 4:46 in the morning. They never sleep! Music all night. The people in the apartment above me agree with that sentiment as well, and have been stomping some dance steps out for the past thirty minutes above my head. Other than that, the view out my sixteenth floor window is really amazing at this time. Most people (and I use the term 'most' very loosely) are asleep at this point, and the only (also used loosely) lights still shining are coming from the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings.

So you might be asking yourself at this point why I would trade in my '94 Landcruiser for a Metrocard and blisters...allow me to explain. There was a day when I was little that I watched a movie and none of the characters, dialogue, or story plot mattered. It was the background that captured me. New York City has been a muse to the mind for ages, and I am no different in that sense. From that time on, New York City has always been the destination. Now let me cite another moment. It was on my first trip to New York City as a much shorter version of myself that I stood in one of the many galleries of the MoMA and saw my very first Cindy Sherman photograph. I can't fully explain it, but it made me feel something I had never felt before at any moment in my entire life, and I knew that my life from then on was going to be about getting to that point, and hopefully, causing that feeling in someone else.

Other than that, all you really need to know about me is that I'm Italian, Lactose Intolerant, and pretty damn sarcastic. I can also drink my weight in chocolate milk. Oh, and I really, really need to sleep more. Like right now.


NOW.