CD: Cre8tive Warehouse: Sculptor featured artist for First Friday

TIM PRATT
STARKVILLE — When A.J. Meadows was growing up in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, he never really thought of himself as an artist.
He was better at math than he was at painting and drawing. Even when Meadows moved to south Mississippi in 2000, he never considered a career in the arts.

That all changed when Meadows graduated from Meridian High School in 2002 and came to Mississippi State University. He began his schooling as a civil engineering major, but decided he didn’t want to work on roads for the rest of his life. Then he switched to architecture because he thought he might want to design bridges, but that didn’t suit him, either. Meadows even switched to graphic design, but his disdain for computers left him searching for another career path.

It was only after Meadows took a sculpture class in 2005 at Mississippi State when he found his calling: He wanted to become an artist.

“It made me feel good,” Meadows said of his first venture into sculpture. “It made me feel accomplished.”

Fast-forward five years and Meadows, now 25, has graduated from Mississippi State with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture and is applying to graduate schools all over the U.S., and in Scotland. He says his life is in a “transitional period” as he creates art, but also works at Restaurant Tyler to make ends meet. Eventually, he wants to teach art in a university setting.

Read complete article at Commercial Dispatch.