My name is Hilary Westhoff and I have wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember. Growing up in the small town of Wray, Colorado, I didn't get much support in my career choice. My mom was the director of the local museum and I loved going to help set up displays in the rotating art gallery. I was able to see a variety of different styles from local artists, Chinese tapestry artists, comic book artists and a few other artists.

My freshman year of highschool my family moved about an hour and a half away to Stratton, Colorado. That had to be the longest 9 months of my life. It was a very small school and most of the people there hated me. I took some art classes and submitted some of my art to art shows and actually won ribbons. This meant people actually thought I was good! We moved again to Cañon City, Colorado my sophomore year of highschool and that's when things really started to take off for me.

The school was a lot bigger and there were a lot of different types of art classes to take. My art teacher encouraged me and gave me advise on classes to take because he thought I was good. I always received over a hundred percent in all my art classes. Once again, someone thought I was good at art! I took a commercial art class and decided that would be a good way to go in an art career. I could use my art to support myself and my family and still be able to make other art on my own. My parents kept saying that I would never make any money being an artist, but I really wanted to prove them wrong.

I attended the University of Southern Colorado in Puebl, Colorado (is now called Colorado State University - Pueblo). It took me 5 years to get my Bachelors degree in Art with a minor in Women's Studies. I took lots of art history, ceramics and graphic designs classes. I started taking the Women Studie's classes to fill required basic classes, but ended up very interested in them. Since I had to declare a minor I decided Women's Studies would be an interesting one. The classes made me think about things I had avoided pretty much my entire life. I had to speak up in classes instead of sitting in the back row and just listening. It was in these classes I realized I had lost my self esteem with my parents telling me I shouldn't be an artist. At the same time, I learned how strong I was to take on an art degree with no self esteem. I hated to be judged and that's pretty much what art classes did. They judged your skill as an artists and how good you are. I graduated May of 2002 from college and was ready to show everybody how good I really was.

I first took a job as an ad designer for a local weekly paper. That was boring and I hated it and luckily the owner decided he couldn't afford having so many ad designers and let me go. Of course I was upset I lost my first job right out of college, but I tried not to let it set me back because I hated the job anyway. A few months later I started working as a marketing assistant with a realestate company and finally found the job I knew I could get. I design flyers and brochures to help the agents sell their listings and I'm also able to do my art work. I am also able to do other graphic design jobs for other businesses on my own time so I don't get bored working in the same format all the time.

Now that I had the career I wanted and proved my parents wrong, I was able to focuss on other parts of my life. I married my husband Kris on June 4, 2005. I didn't realize when I married him, I was also getting a real family. My mother-in-law will pull artwork out from all over her house to show off to people when they come to her house and will send people links to my website (which encourages me to keep it updated). I was also amazed that aunts, uncles and cousins actually talked to each other and love each other. I don't think I have ever received as many hugs in the first 25 years of my life as I have in the past 3 years! I have taken the support from the large family I know have and have put the excitement from all that love into my art work.

One of my husband's hobbies is rock crawling which means we go to lots of places a lot of people can't get to in normal vehicles or a big hike. I have taken pictures of parts of Colorado that very few people have been able to personally see. During our adventures, he will drive and I will hang out the passenger window with my camera. I hope through my photography, lots of people can enjoy those places. How many people can say they went up a trail and went above timberline and saw snow in July? Not many, so I take the picture and share it with others.

In high school, I learned about Pointillism and Georges Seurat (1859-1891). I thought his painting "A Sunday in the Park" was amazing. The painting is 81 inches by 120 inches and made up of about 3,456,000 dots. Pontillism us a technique of producing solid space using dots. When two or more colors are used, the colors mix from a distance, creating a new color. Seurat believed physically mixing colors dulls them. The "optical mixing" of two colors creates a brighter picture. Pointillism didn’t become very popular because the paintings couldn’t capture movement at all. The painting is frozen solid and is mostly done with oil paint, but almost anything can be used. I decided to start experimenting with the Pointillism technique in college. I started using markers and shapes and ended up with some very interesting pieces. I love coming up with different combinations of colors and shapes for my pieces. Adding the colored pencil underneath the marker gives it an entirely different look.

There's no special meaning behind my artwork, just feelings. I want to share places I've visited and things I've seen. When I see something that stands out to me like a reflection in a mountain lake or the sun rising over tall Aspen trees, it make me feel happy and I want to share those feelings with others. Old trees that have long died and are starting to twist and rot away make me curious and I look at the way they have twisted over the years and I want to share that curiosity with others, also.

I also love bright colors. I have been experimenting with pointillism and combining colors and shapes. I like the black & white pointillism pieces, but my favorites are the ones with lots of colors. In my paintings and pastels drawings, it's the same way. A white tiger stands out very well against a green, brown and red background.

I use art as sort of a therapy, too. When I just need to relax and unwind after a hard day, I pick up my drawing board and make millions of dots or get messy with pastels or whatever I'm working on at the time. I am able to focus on something besides what is going on beyond the piece of paper. After awhile, I'm ready to come back and take on the next task.

After we come home from a trip I get very excited about looking at the pictures I took. It's the same thing while I'm drawing or painting. I get excited and can't wait to see what the finished piece is going to look like. I get even more excited about sharing them with people. Putting the pieces on a web site makes it a lot easier, because I can show them to people without carrying them around all the time. When people want a pointillism piece made just for them or want one of the prints of the pictures or anything else, it makes me even happier to know that they are going to take that and hang it in a special place so they can enjoy it as much as I have.

Art is a part of me and it makes me happy. I think back to all those people that told me that I could never make a career out of art. Even if my emphasis hadn't been graphic design and I hadn't gotten a job designing brochures and flyers for a real estate company and doing freelance work on the side, I wouldn't care. Creating the artwork is the best part anyway, even if nobody else likes it or cares about it. It makes me happy and that's all that matters.

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."

- Unknown