Savina Tippmann, 15, passed away Sunday, November 14, 2021. Although Savina was just 15, if you talked with her for even a short time, and she let you in, she came away as someone decades older with a perspective that belied her tender age. She had an effortlessness to her amazing intellect and she was her parent's pride and joy. She was confident in her intellect and often researched some esoteric topic that she found interesting, which almost never aligned with what they said she should be learning. She loved that she had lived and traveled abroad and consumed music from every genre and country she could find. She was a voracious reader and a burgeoning artist.

But her art wasn't just in her drawings or the intricate universes she created over weeks that would cover the floors of entire rooms. In her heart and soul, Savina's true artform was in her unique approach to life and that she had the courage to chart her own course. From birth we are all red-faced, round, intense, and pure like Savina. Gradually, however, we are devoured by our parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, gnawed by age, swallowed by social institutions; and by the time we have been digested by all this, most people emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. Savina raged against being a single shade of anything. Savina's world was saturated with color, light and emotion- that is her legacy.