I've been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, and old photos show me making art even before that. Basically, it wouldn't be far fetched to say I came out of the womb with a crayon in my hand. My parents have encouraged this creativity since day one, so growing up only a 10-minute bus ride from the city, we frequented the Met and MoMA a lot from a young age. But I was never a fan of these long days spent in the city looking at art. Create my own work? No problem.

But if you stuck me in front of the greats, I had no interest in looking at it.

My naive self would rather be making my own art than looking at others, even if these others were masters that I could learn from. Even in my teen years, the scope of art that I actually had an interest in viewing was very narrow. I felt drawn to contemporary art and portraiture because it felt more relatable to what I was interested in doing myself. I had no attention span for museums and no appreciation for anything abstract or anything made before 1800.

Being in art school has forced me and my mentality to do a total of 360, and I'm so glad it has. I spent an entire day walking around the Met and MoMA this weekend, and my experience was not even close to comparable with how I used to feel about these two places growing up. Seeing the "Epic Abstraction" show at the Met and the Joan Miró show at MoMA opened my eyes to how far I've come. A few of the assignments in my painting class have forced me to try my hand at abstraction and learn about the work of these great painters like Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, and Jackson Pollack.

While I still don't want to be an abstract painter myself, I no longer dismissively glance at these paintings that are outside my wheelhouse. What used to look like a few stripes or splatters of color on a giant canvas to me now hold so much more meaning and seem so much more revolutionary now that they are put into context. I cannot only understand how difficult and amazing it is to make these kinds of paintings but can see the immense influence that these modern artists have on the contemporary art that I love so much today.

I always knew I was beyond lucky to have parents that supported my passion for art, but more recently I've been realizing how lucky I was to grow up where I did. I had such great exposure to the Met, which now feels like holy ground to me, from such a young age. For anyone at Rutgers, even if it's not art museums, there is so much else to take advantage of being so close to the city.