In The Beginning

My journey as an artist.

My earliest memories of art were as a toddler at the side of my mother watching her sketch doodles on church programs while listening to boring speakers. It was always a way to pass the time. I often wondered why we were there. I think it was so mom could doodle and have a little peace and quiet even though that only came a few minutes at a time.

As I got big enough to control a pencil, i remember my mom showing me how to imagine things from scribbles. She would scribble a simple squiggly line on a piece of paper and then tell me to look at it and finish the drawing into what I saw. At first I didn’t know what to do with it, so she said “Let me show you”. She then proceeded to turn it into a dog or a car or a tree. I soon caught on and pretty much every Sunday growing up I’d spend Sundays drawing scribble drawings with my mom at church. I cherish those memories and long for the simple days of childhood.

As I get into this story, I need to lay down some things that happened in my life. They are important to the journey. I won’t go into too much detail, but enough to get the point across. My mom was raised by alcoholic parents. Her dad was a commander in the navy and was gone a lot and her mother was trying to keep things together at home with her husband away long spurts at a time. When her dad was home he would sexually molest my mother and then leave her a candy bar on her pillow as an apology the next morning. My grandmother knew this was going on but in her troubled mental state felt helpless to do anything about it. This went on for years and years. One day my grandmother had enough and took her own life with poison. My mother was there when it happened.

At the time, it was not the in thing to go get counseling or any type of therapy. If you did, you were considered broken. Some of us still think that today. My mom married when she was young and never had the time to really work through the issues from her childhood.

One thing a troubled childhood will do for many people is make them creative. When you have to go into your imagination to make a better world, you get pretty good at creating. My mom could draw and paint beautifully. The man she married, my dad Ray, was also extremely creative. The two combined were a force to be reconned with. They created their own beautiful works of art and that was passed through the blood to myself and my siblings.

When I was five months old my father died of leukemia. His death, my mom having eight kids at home, and untreated mental illness, sent my mom into a downward spiral that shaped my life...