Ah, my beloved Hollywood Hills! For those who don’t know, these hills sit right behind Sunset Boulevard, bordering Studio City, Universal, Burbank, Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Griffith Park. They’re home to the Hollywood sign, the Hollywood Bowl, and some massive homes of A list actors, musicians, and producers. If you ever watched ‘The Hills’—these are them!

I grew up on the other side, The Valley (yes, THAT Valley), where a lot of the big movie studios are. Coming from a modest neighborhood with a family in the industry, I never thought much about these hills—unless we had to drive over them, which could sometimes be a traffic nightmare.

When I was twelve, we moved 45 minutes away, which, to a teen in the 90’s, might as well have been Mars. I graduated high school in Westlake Village and then unexpectedly got into UCLA as an art major and moved to Westwood. Suddenly, I was parked on the other side of the Hills, and for the first time, I really saw them. Seeing those same hills as a freshly minted ‘adult’ felt completely different. We were fledgling grown ups, and the Hills were the backdrop of our new life. I graduated college and eventually ended up in West Hollywood, literally two blocks away from the Hills.

People have a lot of misconceptions about Los Angeles. Granted, it’s a bizarre place, but for those of us raised here, it can be a true paradise. At one point, my friends all lived within a one mile radius, I could walk to work on Melrose, and then walk in the other direction to hike in Runyan Canyon, where I’d walk past celebrities and their dogs as we all enjoyed spectacular view. I could walk two blocks to bars on Sunset and our joke was that we just had to ‘point ourselves down the hill’ to get home. And the weather? I once wrote an actual poem about the air temperature and light quality because I was so inspired! When LA is good, nothing compares.

The sunsets are Hollywood are truly something else. The sun turns gold, the hills glow purple and the lights look like twinkling diamonds at dusk. The palm trees—so impossibly tall and spindly—remind me of fireworks, with their long stems and bursts of fronds at the top. At times, LA felt like living inside a Dr. Seuss book or even Disneyland…I have more wild stories than you can count!

This painting captures a view from Silverlake…a funky, eclectic neighborhood a few miles east of West Hollywood. I was visiting my cousins when we turned a corner on a quiet street, and this view stopped me. It had everything I love—those purple hills, the golden glow, the palm trees, and of course, epic memories of where my life really began.