My name is Trevor Higgins. Though Higgins may now sound like an English surname, its origins go back to 6th century Ireland, and a half-mythical figure of Uiginn, or Niall of Tara, who is believed to have been a Viking.

I was born 30 years ago, on May 20th in 1983, on the south side of Boston, Massachusetts. Naturally, I can’t remember almost anything that had happened during the first two or three years of my life, so I had to interview my numerous relatives to know more about those times. My father, Patrick Higgins, was a deep-water sailor; after my birth, he went ashore and started working in port, which has remained his occupation up until the present. My mother, originally Mary O’Brien, was a municipal college teacher of English literature. By coincidence, they met each other not in Massachusetts or any other American state, but in India, during the Holi festival in 1979, and in 1981 they married in Boston.

I am the eldest child in our family. In 1986, my mother gave birth to Sean and Lynn – they are twins; their hair is as red as fire, and their temperament is the same. Being their elder brother and having to take care of them, I had some hard times when our parents were away. Now we are getting along just fine, but back then, they were two little daredevils seeking to show me how much destruction they could deal.

When I was six, I started attending Josiah Lyndon Elementary School. My favorite disciplines there were drawing and literature. I participated in numerous citywide and statewide drawing contests among children, and even won the first prize in June, 1994, for the best landscape at the Prennings Contest. This fact encouraged me to develop my artistic skills, so when I was entered high school, I already knew that I wanted to enter the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. I worked hard on my skills, and attended fine art courses–at the age of 18, I entered the Institute. At Lesley University, I focused on the conception of minimalism in fine arts; the topic of my thesis was “Minimalistic Depiction of Faces: Simplifying K. Malevich,” where I researched ways of evoking emotions by means of an extremely minimalistic manner of painting, assuming composition, scene, and colors.

After my graduation in 2004, I spent about a year and a half traveling. I went across the United States, and traversed the continent from East to West, and back again. I’ve went to Native Americans’ sacred lands, visited all the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, and many other inspiring places, making sketches and etudes. I’ve traveled to other countries as well, such as Peru, Iceland, and China. In the winter of 2005, I visited Saint-Petersburg, Russia, and fell in love with this city forever. I bought a cheap camera, and photography became a great aid to me in