Just a quick update.

I'm glad that you are that conservative, at least that's what they call it. I don't think of it as conservative to do realism or to do illustrative representational *real* looking places and creatures of imagination, mostly because the "modern" less representative styles have been around just as long. And much of the time look like "getting sloppy because the artist got depressed and couldn't draw well to begin with." I hated it for years until in college one humanities course started talking about what some of those pieces meant -- the ones I hated most.

And then I realized that in addition to not liking the colors or the sloppiness or the mess, I really hated what those paintings were saying and violently disagreed with their theme and message. It was there, but I don't like getting raged at either in art or by people screaming. Your art's cooler than a lot of the things I've seen held up as supposed greatness, and it reminds me a lot of the artists you listed as favorites. I hope you do well there and I hope at least some of your teachers appreciate your picking up on some of the cool things from times before photography -- because you take it so far beyond photography. Way cool.

I don't assume it makes you in any way conservative that when you draw a panther it wouldn't look out of place hanging next to a Charles R. Knight panther. More that like Knight, you love nature and you're far better than I am at projecting that same natural feeling to creatures of imagination.