I grew up surrounded by photography and the traditional arts my mother encountered in over fifty years of traveling the world. Having studied under Richard Avedon, Walter Rosenblum, and Alexey Brodovitch, her clients included British Airways, Time, Glamour, The Economist, House and Garden, Scholastic, the US Army, Caravan, and Travel and Leisure. Her personal photographs featured notably in Life, and the New York Times Magazine. A work by Joseph Cornell using one of those images is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. My father, assistant to William Helburn, was a superb portraitist and master of the black and white print. He built strobe units. 

To my mother, I owe my sense of color and visual texture, to my father, composition and craftsmanship. But I did not find my art until, at eleven years old, I was given oil paints in school with the instructions to paint a landscape. Glorying in the rich colors and buttery feel of the medium I created a lush biomorphic abstraction, only to be chastised by the teacher for ignoring the assignment. I remember being very upset, but adamantly defending my work. 

My fate was sealed.