ABOUT THE ARTIST

My name is Sydney Rae. Among many sports, one of my passions was volleyball. I was in various leagues and played on different teams. About the age of 11, I began to experience many broken bones in my fingers which kept re-occurring during games. This would knock me out competition for weeks to months. At the same time, I began developing pain in my joints. After a few visits to the orthopedic surgeon, the rheumatologist and some MRIs and blood work, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). Add that to my other autoimmune condition, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, and I started feeling like a medical textbook. At the time, all of this sounded like a bad intersection of conditions I didn’t want to deal with. I researched these new conditions, especially Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) because my finger joints and wrists would always ache even when I wasn’t playing volleyball. Now I had a clue what was happening. I couldn’t do much about EDS since it just meant soft bones and very flexible joints, but RA made my joints hurt.

Since I had to stop playing volleyball, I needed a new hobby I could do with my fingers and hands. What was born from that was a love for sketching and drawing. Drawing was always a passion, but when I began devoting more time to it, I found that my eye can see the delicate lines and shadows of a cheek and nose, of a dress ruffle, of a chin and smile and translate what I saw to guide my fingers with my sketch pencil. I posted my creations on the back of my bathroom door as my showroom. When my drawings were accidently discovered by my dad one day, he showed my mom. I was embarrassed to show my art to my family or friends since I was still the quiet 3rd child. My mother soon enrolled me in evening art school and I began to create a portfolio. I embraced this newfound gift with a pencil, a brush, an occasionally a lens.

But I also saw the need to bring awareness to Rheumatoid Arthritis in children and young adults. I speak out about RA at schools to young adults and I have created this website and foundation to raise awareness of RA in kids and young adults and raise money for RA research. Please consider my story and journey and enjoy my art, my “RA Art”, my ART-hritis art.