Vegas Stripped: Balancing chaos with art — VIDEO

Between the ages of eight and 14, Clarice Tara lived under an umbrella of mental abuse from her mother's boyfriend. At 14, she left to live with her father, whose abuse of drugs drove Clarice to forms of self-abuse herself.

After marrying at 20, her husband joined the army, and they moved to Texas. But after his return from a tour in Iraq, he became verbally and physically abusive. Cutting away from him, she set out to find some semblance of peace.

She apprenticed at a tattoo shop for 6 months, where a resident tattoo artist had her sit at a desk and draw human portraits over and over. During that time it became clear she wanted to do art for life.

She credits the Las Vegas art community for allowing her to thrive and grow as an artist.

"This art community seems to be elevating each other instead of there being this competition," she says.

This fall is her second year at UNLV where she is working on her Bachelor's in Fine Arts. Her main project is a series of portraits called "The Weight". She arranges for friends to meet with her, talk about a time in their life when they felt a heaviness from suffering, and then asks them to pose in a way that they feel best shows where they are mentally at in handling the weight of the situation. She then photographs them, and later draws their portrait with pencil or colored pencil.

She recently began putting the portraits on mirrors. "The viewer is just as important if not more important than the artwork itself," she says. It was important that viewers see the subjects in these drawings as experiencing a "weight" that she believes is universal. Her greatest goal is to connect viewers to that idea and receive some level of peace from that camaraderie.

"We all suffer alone but we're not alone in that suffering," she says. "Instead of dwelling on that heaviness, I had to see it as something as this is going to lift me up this is going to give me strength."

The heaviness, she says, is usually circumstantial, and when you get through it, it becomes a source of strength. In the meantime, connecting with others assuages the pain.

You can find her work on Facebook at "The Art of Tara" and on Instagram @claricetara. Beginning in December an exhibit of her work will be displayed at Jana's RedRoom in the Arts Factory in Las Vegas.