Youth Art

With no art in school, I taught myself from 3rd grade through high school. In 4th grade I made a book on birds to earn a cub-scout badge and began an obsessive hobby of depicting hundreds of animals and people I knew, imagined or found in books, magazines and movies. I included dinosaurs, fossils, historical characters (especially Lincoln), movie stars like Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley, hometown beauty queens, imaginary cars, animals I could paint on friends’ leather jackets, and welcome signs I painted for the town entrances. I learned a great deal about our world and its history and built my own image library. I worked mostly in pencils, ink and house paint. I knew little of art until school guidance counselor Larry Lewis and Haystack's Francis Merritt, introduced me to RISD. These images are a small sample of my early interests.