I'm old, as in past 60 and moving fast to the next realm. I'll attempt to tell you far too much about the past.
My career in art began when I was quite young. I combined wetting my pants in class and continually drawing Disney characters to the chagrin of my kinder- garten teacher, Sister Immaculate Sanctum-o-rother (the names are fictitious to spare my rotten soul -from something [or other] and eventual barbecue sauce).
My favorite character was Donald Duck -- something about bills that fascinated me -- and his frontal nostrils. The nice old teacher would attempt to keep encouraging me to draw "But please, right now, let's study our lessons". She must have given up on me. I remember that her attempts just seemed to cease.
I was fitted with glasses (cheap birth control frames included) in the 3rd grade and my reputation as a "cute boy" declined rapidly. I folded into myself and began my career as a really sneaky kid -- seldom ever found out in the endless mischief at hand. But after some years and eventually acquiring the horrible reputation that I deserved as an overly imaginative kid (I had a "dirty" mind as sanctioned by the Catholic Church) I reverted further into myself and spent endless hours alone learning to draw anatomy --strictly human female as I recall.
My goal in life was to escape to the South Pacific aboard a ship and live among the natives. I'm not sure where that idea came from but I filled my room with tikis and other articles of Hawaii plus drawings of naked girls, carefully disguised to avert my parent's attention. I'm not sure when that mood faded away but after spending one semester at the Burnley School of Commercial Art (I came to hate that non-freedom graphics environment) I was accepted at Chaminade College in Hawaii and I ran away to paradise to study biology. Good-bye art (for some time to come).
Art to me became building and racing motorcycles, building show vehicles, dune buggies, general mechanics and welding, metal fabrication and unbridled goofiness. In the years that followed, after my return to the mainland U.S. (and a draftee stint in the U.S. Army as a communications chief - sarge -and a good long tour of Europe) I became self employed, struggled with my need to give all my work away, learned to apply my skills with welding and creating metal work, became a furnace install and repair guy, worked in sheet metal and drove an oil tanker truck, started an organic apple orchard which we ran for over 20 years and then took up programming, working for people who create job site 3D visualization tools.
That's where I am now -- doing 3D stuff and trying to teach others what I know before I croak. I'm a crusty old male with lots of broken bent bones, lumps and scars and I wouldn't trade anybody's life for mine. I also wouldn't wish this aching bag of bones on anybody else but the lifetime of adventure -- that can't be reproduced anymore. Glad I was there. If only I could go back.
Cheers!
