Nouvel Ayes

Making things worth looking at.

I've been making art since before I can properly remember starting — my mother is an artist herself, and I think I inherited it before I even knew what that meant. My first real memory of "this might be a thing I'm good at" was winning a classroom drawing contest in the first grade, sketching Santa Claus during our year-end party. From there it just kept going. Poster-making contests, mural painting, event props — in grade school, high school, and college, I was usually the one asked to help design the poster, paint the backdrop, or represent the class in a competition. I placed first more times than I can count, and just as often, I was doing it for free — helping teachers and classmates with their own projects because I genuinely enjoyed it. I never went to art school. Everything I know is self-taught: watching, copying, failing, adjusting, and doing it again. In parallel, I pursued a completely different path academically — a degree in Computer Science — and today I work as a Software Engineer. Art was never my job, but it never stopped being mine either. After graduating, the practice continued — competitions, exhibits, commissions. I've run art workshops for grade schoolers and led sessions during Arts Month events, passing on what was never formally taught to me in the first place. I also share bits of the process online, because art made in isolation is only half the story. I work across mediums — acrylic, oil, watercolor, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, mixed media, and digital — and across subjects: landscapes, portraits, still life, abstract, representational, and whatever refuses to be categorized. I don't have one signature style because I've never wanted one. I just want to keep making things that are honest. This gallery is a running record of that — a software engineer's other language.