The first connection to art and myself was in the first grade. The teacher had us all facing her as she started doing the alphabet. She got to B and drew a balloon with a tail on it. The wavy line caught my attention and I dared to turn and copy the line in my scribbler.

She caught me and screamed at me to stop and approached me and threw my scribbler to the back of the room and sent me to stand in the hall facing the wall. I missed that day about learning about the alphabet letters after B! I wonder if that is why I can not spell to this day.

The second time Art comes to my mind as important was in Grade four. The teacher had us paint trees on the floor on a large roll of paper she rolled out.

I am not sure why but I started to paint one line up the middle then added lines on each side of the first and turned them into branches, then added brush dabs/squishes of green paint as leaves.

The teacher was amazed because I did not produce the “Lollypop” trees the other kids did.

I then remember her tearing of the paper strip and watching her carry my big painted tree down the hall like a flag to show someone.

Then the next concrete memory of my ability in art affecting my life was in Belmont in a country two-grades-to-a-room school classroom.

Mrs. Murphy asked me to draw a picture from a book of a bird to illustrate her lesson.  I did it, avoiding a English grammar lesson with joy.

Well, it seemed to be really amazing. She drew a line around it on the back blackboard and it stayed untouched for the rest of the school year.

In my high school education I received the drive for details and very clear straight lines. I went to a tech high school, George Harvey Vocational Institute in Toronto, and I  majored in architectural drafting.

The drafting teacher Mr. Branch, a Canadian Vet with little hand abilities because of the war, demanded attention to detail and its importance for who was looking at your work to gain insight.

I also  had to take an architectural illustration class from Miss Clark, an amazing person and teacher. She was the first person to give me a dream of being a visual artist.

In her class she had us rendering classic capitals, shading to create form correctly and working on a presentation image of a classical building. We did this  on a full size sheet of mat board, to mention only two projects.

It is because of this full two years of tight developing of a image I feel has been part of my drive to paint in the realistic fashion that I do.

I then graduated and went to work at Ontario Hydro as a draftsman. I soon realized it was not as creative a career as I had expected and was the farthest job from being personally creative for me.

I decided with the encouragement of my new bride Wanda to go to McMaster University. Their classical figure and techniques focus was to me “cool.”

Most  universities were teaching what appeared to be a focus on developing individual creativity and that did not appeal to me.

On graduation I felt, being married, that I needed a job and income security. I enrolled in teacher’s college.

It was a role where I felt I could further explore art media and work in an environment of positivity and productivity.

I also had the chance while at teacher’s college to practise teach under Bob Bateman.

It was in his last years of teaching and going out on his own as an artist.

He advised me to try to have a an art career but that it was very hard.

He felt teaching had given him in a secure income but had curtailed his painting efforts to a degree.

I found the art  classroom became my training ground for applied theory, rationals,  media techniques and skill development for not only myself but kids.

Every year there were kids who had talent and I saw how they created, and thus learned from them as well. My classroom was a sandbox of creativity and skill demonstration for all who entered.

The classroom was the training I received in learning to doing a visual image that was not only a picture but a conversation with the viewer as Magritte did so clearly in “this is not a pipe” painting.

The final stage or experience that pushed me to producing professional images for galleries was when I returned to school again to earn a Masters in Art Education.