Painter

My very earliest memory is of myself at age 4 1/2 making a picture for my father and grandmother to take to my mother who was giving birth to my sister Ruth. My younger brothers and my father and grandmother were watching admiringly, instilling some seminal memory of myself as an artist. Yet, other than going into the art room outside of class time in high school and sculpting an Indian head that the teacher recognized as a self-portrait, I focused on academics, even while envying my siblings David and Ruth's art lessons with Miss Fields down the street. Traveling, my camera let me make images. In India, I became fascinated with batik and, when my camera malfunctioned, I transferred my image-making passion into learning something of the various styles of batik in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Decades later, a woman friend in New York City, who was considering enrolling in the art therapy program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, invited me to go with her to a Saturday art therapy workshop. That day of sitting on the floor in groups making pictures with cheap paints and no judgment or expectation of quality, only the freedom to express oneself freely, opened a new world, and I began making an outpouring of artwork on cheap paper with cheap paints in my apartment after work, free to pour out paintings without concern for quality or about wasting materials.