What is your favorite work of art? What do you love about it?

I find this such a difficult thing to answer. When I was younger, I hung around my aunt and uncles house a lot. My uncle had been doing paintings in acrylic and water colour for years. He had literally hundreds of paintings of still life he had done, and while good, it wasn't what I would have said was superb. I really shouldn't be one to critique though, as I couldn't do any better.

Due to his influence, I began to take an interest in drawing as well. Most of my subjects were animals as I was a kid who loved animals. Always a heavy reader, I began illustrating some of the characters in the novels.

While I had a huge range of drawings eventually at one point, one of poignant recall is that of a young woman sitting on floor of the ocean wearing a garment of seaweed nursing a dragon. In the last years of high school, it became radically apparent that my artwork was vastly different from those of my classmates. Such comments as 'if you really see that, you should probably get your head checked'. I always loved those, namely because these were the ones in which I had stopped being firmly grounded in reality and just explored the boundaries of my imagination.

Then as I kept drawing, I was drawn (pun intended) to the human form, and found beauty in sometimes the seemingly grotesque and thus my favorite paintings became the rubeneque woman. I loved the extra, the roundness and softness. I looked at Monet, Van Gogh, Klimt, and so many more that I couldn't even begin to name.

Yet, Da Vinci's art work, and his insatiable curiosity is what captured and held the love I possessed for both art and science and as I began to look at his works, read coffee table books on him, I began to form an opinion of who he was as a person and I often thought if I could sit down with any painter/artist it would be him.