When I was 12 an artist set up across the road from where I lived and painted our neighbor’s 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. Later, in California, I took some lessons from Betty Brown in portrait drawing. Betty Brown trained all the quick sketch artists that worked at Disneyland.  But then academic studies took me away from painting for several years.