I came to painting late in life; I was 24 ;)
I was at university, and had spent 4 years on a Science track where I found delight in the empirical nature of microbiology, zoology, botany, and organic chemistry with a dream of becoming a woman’s doctor because I didn’t believed that a male doctor could effectively diagnose the subtle interactions of a woman’s body-mind.
In a Pharmacology lab, we were to inject rats with Aspartame (trade names NutraSweet, Equal, and Canderel) in order to produce cancerous growths in the brain of these living creatures. And then, we were to inject them with varying doses of a second drug so that we humans (‘lab rats’) could document its already known effects on the tumor. Results ‘already known’ because this was a standard experiment that was performed by students in PMCOL 200 for who knows how many years on who knows how many living creatures.
So, I switched tracks to Physical Anthropology and found myself in the Fine Art classroom of the great Robert Sinclair. He brought to his art and his teaching the wisdom of practice: the Practice of meditation, of drawing and of looking.
Here, instead of following the worn narrow trenches of a rat cage, I experienced the limitless vastness of the blank canvas and the yet to be discovered symbols within my own mind. From those formative moments, my drive as an artist has been to tell stories.