The first glimpse I ever got into what would become a career in art started with a pack of crayons underneath my grandma's coffee table when I was five. It was a "canvas" hidden until my grandmother's first discovery of it, whereupon she paddled my behind. But that was not going to stop me, no siree. Especially since I was painting it for free.
Now given the extent of the discomfort I felt in my behind, I may have felt quite like growing up to be anything but an artist, so I tried this and that, until one day, an old traveling signpainter let me help him one day, and the rest is, as they say, history. I helped him paint a sign along the highway for a tire shop. I got to draw this really huge tire on the sign, and he actually paid me to do it. So much for drawing for free.
I remember telling him back then how that I thought I had good "brush control", whereupon he laughed. Where I came up with that term I will never know. All I know is, I wasn't a signpainter back then.
I think that day came when I got me one of those old black round top lunchpails that held a thermos in the top, whereupon I discarded the thermos, replacing it with some pint size cans of paint. Included in my "mobile sign shop" was a jar of thinner that had a screw tight lid, a few old lettering quills I bought from another signshop, and a rag, which I rolled the brushes up in. I was a sign shop on two feet.
But then came the real sign shop. I suppose it was bound to happen. By that time I had made enough money to actually buy that old coffee table with my earliest drawing on it, from a relative who had inherited it when my grandmother died. But he didn't want to sell it. I wanted it, I would have hung it on the wall of my shop. But that backside coffee table top "canvas" with it's incomprehensible crayon scribbled mess was HIS, not mine, and he wasn't ABOUT to part with it. Turns out my true masterpiece was nothing more than a simple, innocent expression of myself, an extension of myself which they would not sacrifice at any cost, because of what it meant to them.
