Back in August of 2016, I was standing in a garage with a tupperware container full of my paintings, watching a bespectacled woman carefully page through my work. I had been invited there to cut stained glass with a group of grandmother-age ladies, but I had brought my paintings in case the hostess' daughter (an artist in a local gallery collective) happened to visit. I got lucky - she came by, and her mother insisted she look over what I brought. And after two years of untrained play with watercolors, I bit my lower lip as she rifled through the container, expressionless. She paused over two my pieces, murmuring compliments about color and composition, and encouraged me to submit them to an upcoming open show at her gallery. She thought they had a real shot of being good enough to get in. "Sophie's Adamanth", the painting he named I felt giddy on the drive home and called my friend Jess, a professionally-trained artist with a Fine Arts degree from