I didn't grow up with the arts. For my brief stage career I played a guard in The Mikado in elementary school. Lucky me, I got to bring home my rubber tipped spear between rehearsals. At rehearsal, though, I sat bored in our stiff seats and decided to sing along. The music teacher, a silver-haired gentleman with a prissy manner, rapidly called us to a halt. He must have heard what sounded like scratching on a blackboard. One by one he went through the rows until he got to me. He tapped his tuning fork and asked me to sing this note. Did I warble? Did I screech? Was I really so far off? He ordered me not to sing. And I rarely have since then, not for the national anthem, not for birthdays, not even in the shower.  As for drawing I had no such trauma. I simply saw what other boys could do. And not once did I think I was missing out. I had basketball, Boy Scouts, all the suburban pursuits. At ninth grade graduation I won the prize for best composition. My future was set. I'd be a writer when I grew up.

By my late thirties I was an environmental journalist. I also kept journals, so a weekend workshop on nature journaling sounded ideal. With a little nudging, my morning pages filled with pep talks and complaints could evolve into the kind of fine writing found in Thoreau's journals, wise observations rather than my rambling self-talk. But such was not to be. Our leader, an art teacher, introduced me to scrapbooking, instead. We began with a hardbound book for drawing that we wrapped in cloth cut from an old tee shirt to create our own personal cover for our journal. Inside the blank pages were ours to fill with drawing, writing, doodling, cutting up pictures for collages, gluing down our own photographs, copying out song lyrics, recording and celebrating our lives however we pleased. Maybe I couldn't draw but I could spread paint across a page then glue a cluster of pine needles. For the first time I felt the joy of creating visual images. Art supplies, especially the spray glue can, became my favorite toys. Crude as my talents may have been, my journal pages had so much more heart and zest with photos and doodles and ticket stubs and whatever else caught my fancy. No longer just reams of handwriting. There was something child-like in making these books, and several years later when I left midtown Manhattan for a Catskills log cabin, I learned the Woodstock motto: you're never too old to have a happy childhood. 

Jump ahead to my early sixties. I lived for a time in an artist’s loft building. Not the creative hot-house I'd hoped for, but I did take a daylong workshop taught by my friend down the hall, Ellen McKay. In the past I'd tried a drawing workshop that convinced me anew that I had no clue how to render the flower vase on the table as a flower vase on my drawing pad. But Ellen put nothing on the table. She put a paintbrush in our hands and asked us to explore what the brush could do. No longer was I trying and failing to render what I saw. I was swiping and smearing and jiggling and stutter-skipping and going feather light, then slashing like a sword. It was true, a brush could make all kinds of impressions, some of which started to look like something. A spiral eye in one spot. A curlicue puffer fish in another. Was I revealing a Rorschach of my soul? I got hooked on this approach to painting and still am. When the brush gets busy on the paper, I feel myself reaching for what Frederico Garcia Lorca called duende, the "'black sounds'...the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art."