About Artist Vicky Wu
I first began drawing and painting at a very young age because I was surrounded by artists. My grandfather and aunt were both artists who had sold professionally even though art was not their full-time career.
In fact, one of my very first pieces of art is this selfie that I drew at age 3 for my mom. I’m definitely not saying I was a good artist at age 3, yet it does sort of look like me lol.
I was constantly painting and drawing and doing every type of art I could get my hands on, which was limited during that time because my single mom just didn’t have enough money to buy me art supplies. I took art in school to hone my skills and learn some of the technical aspects and history of art … I loved my art history classes – to this day those are still some of my favorite.
Throughout middle school and high school I continued to create art. Here are some of those older images. You can see I definitely improved since age 3!
You also notice that I was heavily into realism, and for the most part used colored pencil as my medium of choice. (You can click or hover on each one to see a larger version).
During high school, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to have a career in art; you always hear about “starving artists” and I definitely did NOT want to be that. So I found a field that could use my creativity and some other interests, and got into advertising and marketing, and started a decades-long career as a pretty awesome marketer.
In the years after high school, life got busy with full-time work and finishing my degree in marketing part-time while raising a house-full of kids, and I didn’t have as much time to work on my art. It seemed when I did as my kids were young, they always managed to “help” me, and somewhere I have quite a few paintings and drawings that they added their own unique scribbles to. It didn’t anger me at all – I enjoyed that they wanted to create with me.
Fast forward quite a few years, and I picked back up one of my other hobbies – dancing – when I became a ballroom dance instructor and focused on teaching engaged couples how to dance for their wedding. This was my main hobby and my form of exercise as a “side gig” to my main job as a Chief Marketing Officer. Then we needed to move for my husband’s job, I shut down that dance studio, and during moving for work a few times in a few years, was excited to finally settle back down so that I could open that studio again. Life had other plans, and the pandemic hit and we were all quarantined (and it’s hard to partner dance when you have to maintain 6′ social distancing!)
I still needed a creative outlet, so I decided to focus on art again. This time, I wanted to stretch my creativity and try painting styles that I had never done before, influenced by some of my favorite artists. And that’s where we are today.
