![\"Aileen](\"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/files\/2015\/11\/aileen-cave-16538_023.jpg\")
<\/a>Wright State art student Aileen Cave finds purpose in painting after a career in banking and law. (Photos by Erin Pence)<\/p><\/div>\n
Her father worked as an electrical engineer but is also a cross-stitching artist and photographer; her mother is a writer. As a young girl, Cave remembers running to her room and grabbing her pad and pencil when her parents bought a bright yellow Buick Skylark and pulled it into the driveway.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went out on the porch and sat and just sketched that car,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Cave grew up in Tampa, Florida, but was drawn to rural life and would spend summers with relatives who were dairy farmers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A year after graduating high school, she spent an entire year on the farm, where she would rise daily at 2 a.m., milk cows for six hours, eat, nap and then milk again for another four hours.<\/p>\n
She loved the simplicity of the life but also realized how badly she wanted a college education so that she wouldn\u2019t have to work so hard physically. So she took her cow-milking money and enrolled at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.<\/p>\n
Cave\u2019s money ran out after one year, but she later attended Florida State University and then Tallahassee Community College, where she got her associate degree. For the next 17 years she worked as a paralegal, raised a family and studied journalism at the University of South Florida.<\/p>\n
In 2004, Cave and her family moved to Springfield, Ohio, where she took classes at Wittenberg University as an English major and classes in watercolor painting at the Springfield Museum of Art.<\/p>\n
She enrolled at Wright State in 2012, is taking classes in intermediate painting and advanced drawing and is scheduled to graduate in May with her bachelor\u2019s in fine art<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI loved the fact that they were giving me answers, things I didn\u2019t understand about art, teaching me things I didn\u2019t have a clue about,\u201d she said. \u201cLearning doesn\u2019t have to be at a formal institution, but it sure speeds up the process. You can do it by the school of hard knocks \u2014 which I have done \u2014 but I am ready for the fast track.\u201d<\/p>\n Cave\u2019s goal is to get her master\u2019s degree in fine art and become a studio painter.<\/p>\n \u201cI think you have to paint a whole lot of paintings to own the knowledge,\u201d she said. \u201cI really want to learn how to express the things I want to express.\u201d<\/p>\n Aileen Cave\u2019s goal is to get her master\u2019s degree in fine art and become a studio painter.<\/p><\/div>\n In the meantime, Cave is reveling in her experience at Wright State.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat really has made it amazing is the humanity \u2014 the students, the professors. It feels like a family. There is encouragement. There is true kindness,\u201d she said. \u201cI go home all the time saying, \u2018I just love these people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wright State art student Aileen Cave finds purpose in painting after a career in banking and law. Continue reading <\/a>