Sophomore Connie Chao adds white dappled light to her nature landscape, painting over the leaves of the trees. These are the final touches of her exhibition piece. Fueled by pure passion, she uses her free time to work tirelessly after school and during school breaks to sit and paint on her canvases. Taking a step away from the painting to look at it from afar, Chao smiles as she sees another part of her exhibition completed.

As a self-taught artist, Chao has painted over 100 pieces of art and currently does multiple exhibitions per year with her acrylic paintings. She began painting when she was just 5 years old.

“When I first started, my mom painted with me,” Chao said. “My mom didn’t teach me, but basically me and her would paint [while] watching Bob Ross videos. She would just paint with me so I’m not alone.”

Her father, Eugine Chao, owns a gallery shop, and her mother, Janice Luo, also paints. Over the course of her life, Chao has had many people around her who have been involved with art.

“One of my uncles is good at drawing shrimps. I remember that when I was a kid, they would draw shrimps for me,” Chao said. “My best friend is also really good at art; she’s really good at drawing people.”

Chao is currently a DECA student, but in the future she would like to major in business in order to promote herself as an artist or start a business dealing with something related to art.

A consistent focus in her paintings has been landscapes. Chao mainly gets her inspiration from nature by taking walks through Terramar Park in Parkland.

“You have to put yourself in a mood and get inspired,” Chao said. “It really influences me because it’s so beautiful every time I walk out and watch the sunset. Earth is so pretty, and nature is so beautiful, but this is all we have. If we keep polluting it, we might never have this again, and this might forever be only in a picture or only in a painting that we once had.”

Chao would also like to visit more museums and enjoys going to art stores to shop for art supplies and look at brushes.

When she starts painting, she follows her own set process.

“Most of the time, how I start my paintings is I want to capture a feeling of some sort. Then I hold on to that,” Chao said. “I sketch out my little projects that I want to do on a piece of paper first, so I can have an overall vision of what I want.”

First, Chao looks at a reference photo and lays out the positioning on the canvas and the angle of the light source. Then, she starts painting from the background to establish the color and continues to detail from there.

“I go on the internet and scroll on Pinterest, but I really like van Gogh with his blending, landscape and surrealism,” Chao said. “Bob Ross inspired me when I was a kid. Every artist is unique and learning from them is really cool.”

The canvases, paints and brushes she uses for her acrylic paintings are all provided by her dad.

“Whatever I need or want to paint, they will support me,” Chao said. “Art is a pretty expensive hobby because you need a lot of materials for it, but they support me in every way. To support me, they put all my art pieces on the wall and then we would keep switching [the art] because we don’t want to overfill the walls. Then my grandma takes all the good ones and puts them in her room to admire them.”

Chao has won multiple awards for her art; for instance, she has won the Celebrating Art competition multiple times. Currently, she promotes her art on Instagram. Over time, Chao has improved in the coloring, blending and structuring of her work, but despite these betterments she still desires to keep getting better.

“When I first started, I did a lot of anime drawings, very cartoony, but right now I’m trying to move towards realism and especially portraits,” Chao said. “I want to improve my proportions, especially for people. I feel like drawing still life and furniture is pretty easy because they are just still objects, but if you really want to capture the emotions of a person or their soul through their eyes. It’s really hard because one little mistake, and the person looks completely different.”

One of Chao’s main struggles is with positioning, and she wants to take a class for proportioning, drawing humans and mixing skin tones.

“I’m a really bad perfectionist, so I take a lot of time, not because I want to continue sometimes but because I’m angry it’s not what I want,” Chao said.

Currently, she is exhibiting her work in her father’s gallery store, in libraries and at Florida Atlantic University. Chao typically paints over long breaks, such as during summer, to prepare for exhibitions. She was invited to exhibit her work at FAU through an invite by a group celebrating Chinese culture. She continues to exhibit wherever she can and applied for and secured a spot for a future exhibition at the Boca Library from March 3-April 11.

“A worker from the Boca Library actually bought a painting from me and wanted to put my art in the Boca Library,” Chao said.

For every exhibition Chao does, she typically sells her paintings and donates the funds to charity.

“The reason why I am doing this is because when I was born I had a hole in my heart, but thanks to the doctors of Joe DiMaggio Hospital, they helped me recover, and I was able to live because of them,” Chao said. “I’m selling [my art] to help raise money [for] children’s hospitals, so I can repay them for saving my life and giving me a chance to do what I love. I exhibit wherever I can and whoever pays for a painting, that money we save, and after the accumulated money, we mail it to the hospital.”

When preparing for the exhibitions, Chao begins with an overall theme for the paintings. This year, her theme was “beauty of life,” for which she painted nature scenes. Oftentimes, Chao chooses a period of time in which she is not busy, like winter break, and paints 20-30 paintings so that she will have enough to sell.

“I like how people can see my art, and they can see my hard work,” Chao said. “The idea of doing these exhibitions for a purpose to help other people because I’m able to turn my talent to help the community with makes me really happy.”

Looking forward, Chao intends to continue helping her community through donations, as well as painting for her school and her teachers’ projects. Currently, she has submitted an entry for this year’s Celebrating Art competition, a poster for multicultural week and a movie poster for the Broward Literary Fair.

She also aims to create a club that will help other students learn how to paint and subsequently exhibit and sell their artwork. Chao even wants to encourage the students in the club to donate some of their proceeds.

“I feel like if you have a talent you should use it to help other people, so I’m just trying my best,” Chao said. “With art you have to be patient and trust yourself that it will turn out okay. I like art because it’s a good way to de-stress. When you have too much academic pressure, you can just take time and draw a little something-something for yourself. I like the feeling after drawing you can look at what you have done and be proud of it like ‘Wow I did that,’ and it’s a really rewarding feeling.”

Chao has used her art to create a positive impact on her community: she has dedicated her work to helping others, while still expanding her skills as an artist. None of this will end any time soon either, as Chao will continue to expand her exhibitions and improve her work for the foreseeable future, while also donating to causes close to her heart.