My first art teacher

When I was 12 an artist set up across the road from where I lived and painted our neighbors fields and barn. For over a week I stood just back of him each day after school. Somehow I knew not to bug him. He was the one who talked. I didn't have the sense that he was a great painter but someone fully engrossed in creating something special. In the following years I recreated his initial sketch many times -- a large mulberry tree towering over a few sheds and fruit stand just in the distance across the strawberry fields. And that's all I will say about that.

It wasn't until I took an art class at a junior college in Maui that I actually started painting.
The instructor let us go out and just paint. The smell of paint, and mediums drew me in. I took some lessons from Betty Brown in suthern California in portrait drawing. But then academic stuides took me away from painting for a number of years.