Corrin Rausch
Montague Section 83
3/29/2012
Profile
	In a quiet Bountiful neighborhood filled primarily with the sleepy peacefulness of elderly neighbors lives a sixteen year-old high school student.  Besides being the tallest in her family and her unique flair for mixing striped sweaters and polka-dot pants, there is nothing about her that makes her look out of the ordinary.  But she certainly is. In fact, she is quite different from every other sixteen year-old I’ve ever met.
	My little sister Alexis comes home from school and on most days heads straight for her room, where she stays for the most part until dinner.  This behavior is not unlike that of most teenagers; she listens to music while doing homework and texting her friends.  But when her homework is done, and often when it isn’t, Alexis works on one of her many art projects.
	Walking into her room on a recent occasion, I see her hard at work on a giant sketch of a clown.  It’s only a rough sketch, but it’s easy to tell that the piece is going to turn out well.  The smiling clown stares back at me and grins with a giant cigar hanging out of his mouth.  This subject is hardly atypical for her, she was once kicked out of a school art show in junior high because she drew a cartoon of a man smoking and holding a bottle in his deformed hand.
I ask her casually what she’s up to, and she mumbles something inaudible, partially due to the pen she’s chewing on.  Her short blonde hair is slightly disheveled, and her whole body is hunched over the giant sketch board in a manner that displays her deep concentration and warns her family members to disturb with caution.  The desktop computer is on, but its only purpose is to play music.  Today, as well as many other days, Alexis is listening to her favorite musician, Beck.  This is what I like to call Alexis’s “Art Mode.”  She just tunes out everything and focuses on her project, often spending hours and hours on shading just one area or getting the shape of a nose just so.  It’s amazing to watch her work, and I wonder how such a normal child was able to develop such an interesting ability.
	I asked her if she remembered the moment that sparked this passion for drawing.  She replies slowly, “Do you remember when I was four and you were eight and we were drawing rabbits at the kitchen table?”  I reply that I do not remember at all.  She has a knack for recalling small, unimportant details and events from our childhood.  
“Well,” she continues, “We were both drawing and I was so mad that your rabbits looked better than mine, so I vowed that one day, I was going to draw better rabbits than you.”  I laugh at the simplicity and childishness of the story, but I do not doubt it.  Alexis has always been competitive, often comparing herself to me and her schoolmates with almost obsessiveness.  Many times she has ended up in tears because she didn’t do as well as she expected on a project, test, or spelling bee.  But this passion and emotion is a big part of the reason she’s so good.
Alexis has been filling notebook after notebook with sketches ever since that fateful rabbit drawing.  These sketches started out as messy doodles loved mainly for their childlike sloppiness, but quickly grew into fantastically accurate portraits, terrifying fictional creatures, and humorously quirky cartoons.  I believe few people are given natural, raw talent, but instead are given the drive for constant perfection.  This is my sister.  Where my artistic talent has developed very little since I was eight, Alexis has spent a huge part of her life striving to get better and better.  And her hard work has hardly gone unrecognized.
This clown piece she’s working on right now is for a show at a local gallery, one of her favorites.  “If I get in,” she says with a smile, “One of my life goals will be complete!”  Alexis’s piece will no doubt be up against those of artists much older than her, which is both good and bad.  The fact that she is so talented and so young has gained her recognition throughout the community, starting at a local skate shop.  The owner--an artist himself--was impressed by her work and asked to see her sketchbook in person.  He was amazed at how versatile her talent was.  One page would show a grotesque old man wielding an axe, while the next would be a realistic drawing of one of her friends smiling serenely.  The owner of the shop asked her to do some art for the store, and his connections soon landed her a job designing the cover of a DVD for a company called Odeus Skate.  Her work was also featured on various local skate sites.
And that is just the beginning of her lengthy resume.  Alexis has entered and won several art shows for high school aged students, even one specifically for seniors when she was only a sophomore.  And although she admits she is talented, she doesn’t like receiving too much praise.  “I don’t do it to win awards,” she says. “I do it because I love art.”
But one of the most unique things about my sister is not her talent, it’s her dedication to each and every individual project.  She spends as much time on a poster for a school event as she does on one of her gallery pieces.  Often, people she hardly knows will ask her to sketch something for them, and Alexis will always say yes.  She puts all of her effort and skill into everything she does, even if there is little or no reward.  Where most people would half-heartedly throw out a project just to get it done, Alexis spends far more time than is often worth it.  She usually receives little or no pay for these freelance jobs because people don’t understand how much time she has spent putting her heart into every piece she does.
“I would hate to have one of my pieces be seen by the world knowing I didn’t give it everything I had to make it exactly how I wanted,” she told me.  And I couldn’t describe her better.