This piece is one of my parents’ and friends’ favorite pieces. It was selected as one of three pieces to represent my school in an art contest hosted by Congressman Adam Schiff. I made this in ninth grade, when I was taking the painting elective offered at my school. Our art teacher wanted us to use newspaper as the main medium, but I wanted to push the unconventionality of medium even more and ended up using glue as paint as well. Other medium included watercolor, oil pastel, crayon, and acrylic paint, but the glue was able to create the bodily fluid-like appearance that I wanted to convey to correlate with the heart. I cut out key words and headlines that were about natural disasters, murders, accidents, etc. because I wanted to stick with the theme and title that I had come up with before I even began the painting: “Heart Attack.” I really enjoyed creating this because it was the first time I had truly experimented with more unconventional materials as well as reached out to creating more abstract work.