As long as I can remember I have been enchanted with art. My mother told me she would sit me on my potty seat with a pencil so I would stay put. I have reconstructed images of little me redesigning the white bathrooms tiles with my drawings.
Later, in kindergarten, I fell in love with the painting easel equipped with enormous white paper with every primary color sitting like soldiers in neat little plastic cups at the base of the easel. I would deviously start a painting a few minutes before the scheduled recitation of the days of the week or the months of the year. Who cared about days, or months or even years when you have the opportunity to push glorious wet substances along a vertical plane of never ending surface?
All through elementary school I would count the days until we could march down the long hall and descend three perfect steps into Mrs. Lentz’s art room, a virtual emporium of all things available for our art making pleasure. Here I would draw, paint, sculpt and assemble raw products into something that I made with my own hands. The feeling of getting lost in materials was the perfect antidote to the humdrum of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Junior high is a big blur except for the few art classes spliced in between home economics. I remember one of my paintings was chosen to hang in the halls with a proper frame. My largely “uncultured” family hardly owned a dozen books so you can imagine there was not a single piece of art on our walls. The idea of art as something special was a new and exciting concept to me.
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