San Francisco: the Beginning - EMILY BEESON

STORY TIME || HOW MY ART JOURNEY BEGAN...
I moved to San Francisco on a one-way ticket after college and one year of world travel as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in the year following my college graduation (2009-2010). During that year of solo travel, I visited seventeen countries & filled six journals. It was nothing short of a life-altering and eye-opening journey that spanned from the Dominican Republic to South America to India to Southeast Asia and ended in Europe. I fell in love with the concept of Microfinance during that journey and read economist Muhammad Yunus' book "Banker to the Poor" and learned about his pioneering of the microcredit loan movement by founding Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
In 2011, I moved to Madrid, Spain to pursue a Master's Degree in Microfinance at a public Spanish university. The curriculum was taught entirely in Spanish - which was a huge draw! Halfway through the program I decided it truthfully wasn't for me & couldn't forsee a long-term career path in the field, so I moved back to the U.S. to regroup & forge a new trajectory - a move out west.
I got my first art studio in San Francisco's Mission District (out near Potrero Hill) in 2013. In the spring of 2014, I left the city for four months to attend an intensive painting course in Paros, Greece at the Aegean Center for the Arts.

To this day it remains one of the best decisions of my life (four months of intensive Renaissance-style art study on an island in the Aegean Sea in Greece)!

Here are some early studies and experiments from the early San Francisco days (with some Greece moments thrown in too).
Flowers and Doodles have been a beloved focus since these early days!