Paul Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist artist, once said “I am a great artist and I know it. The reason I am great is because of all the suffering I have done.”

There is no truer case than Nathaniel Mary Quinn, raised in the projects of Chicago, Quinn is no stranger to suffering. However, through the pain and loss, he managed to find inspiration and create moving pieces of artwork that eventually found  its way to famous galleries in London and New York.

Many nights Quinn would wake up to the sounds of gunshots ringing through the streets. Peace was  pleasantry not readily available to Quinn in his childhood. He started creating at a young age, with a little bit of help from his mother, “As a child, my mother allowed me to draw on the walls of our apartment. She would just clean the walls and let me draw again, repeatedly,” he told the Huffington Post. It was these walls that sparked the creative genius inside Quinn, starting from copying comic books to creating masterpieces on canvas.