My maternal grandfather bought me my first paint-by-numbers kit. He was a self-taught naïf artist. He copied old masters like Rembrandt and also Japanese art and Chagall. These paintings hung in our house and I remember watching him paint in a little corner of my grandparents’ apartment.
My mother was interested in art at an early age, but a teacher told her she had no talent and she gave it up. When I showed interest in art as a child, I was given everything within my parents’ means to encourage that interest – art supplies and classes and loads of encouragement. I think my mom got vicarious pleasure out of seeing that I wanted to pursue art after her interest was thwarted.
Growing up outside of Manhattan was a rich experience. I had access to all the museums and galleries and I went to the city every weekend to take classes and look at art. While many artists learned about art from reproductions in books, I was privileged to be able to see the real thing. I remember looking a Guernica repeatedly at the Museum of Modern Art which in retrospect must have shown me how an artist can incorporate a critique of current events into his or her art.
What was your route to becoming an artist? (Formal training or another pathway?)
I studied art for one year in a liberal arts college on the east coast, then moved to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, which I did for one year. I left to experience life outside of school for awhile. During that time, which turned into thirteen years, I worked in batik, making work with socio-political themes like U.S. intervention in Latin America (Chile, El Salvador), apartheid in South Africa, the plight of the Palestinian people, and other national and international struggles that I had strong feelings about.
After the thirteen years of working in batik, I felt that I had gone as far as I could with the medium and I wanted to find other ways of working. I went back to school at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland, California. I completed the remaining two years of my Bachelor of Fine Arts and two years later received my Master of Fine Arts degree from the same institution.