My name is Doug Souza and I have been making art, in some form or other, since I was about four years old. It was at about that age when I heard my aunts cussing my mother out for buying me professional art supplies. I remember crying in first grade when the teacher made me use color crayons.

I grew up on a 300 acre dairy farm with a large creek running along the backside where I had mother nature at my fingertips. I spent countless hours roaming the fields and the creek. The ranch was located west of Woodland, California in the Sacramento Valley. At age eleven I won an art contest sponsored by the local newspaper. It was a big deal for me because the contest was open to all ages.

At seventeen I sold my first painting to my childhood hero’s wife, Mae Mays, while attending a baseball camp in the Bay Area.

After a few years of minor league baseball, post high school, I worked as a motorcycle mechanic for a few years before taking a job with Woodland Parks & Recreation, where I coached kids, officiated sports programs, maintained athletic fields and taught drawing and painting classes.

After six years with P&R, I started Souza’s Lettering, a screen printing and sign painting business. In 1998, I took a job with River City Baseball, a group to bring professional baseball back to Sacramento. They became the Sacramento River Cats (AAA team for the Oakland A’s). After getting burn-out from sitting at a desk all day, I took a job in outside sales, selling graphic design for computerized embroidery machines. After 13 years of traveling the eight western states, the company went online and eliminated the outside sales staff in 2014.

While creating art through all these careers, it was time to pursue it on a full time basis. I now live with my wife, Maggie, in Northern CA, along the Sacramento River in the foothills near Mt Shasta and Mt Lassen National Park.