Nothing was better for a boy who, six years earlier, had lost his DNA homeland, and not long after, his entire family. A boy who wandered the playground unaccepted, marked by muscular dystrophy and a body that didn’t fit. In that classroom, with Mrs. Saylor’s voice and my pencil, I belonged somewhere—launched, finally, into a place of my own making.

 

Later teachers would scold me for “not paying attention,” catching me sketching rocket escape towers while lectures droned on. They never understood: I could still recite every word they said, every date, every equation. The drawings weren’t distraction; they were focus. Lines and shading became conduits, channeling complex ideas into something I could hold. The pencil kept my mind tethered to the lesson instead of drifting into the faces around me.

 

I hated being forced to stare forward, to lock eyes with teachers, whose private neuroses I could read in a blink, whose jagged imperfections—crooked teeth, twitching nerves, the way shame lived in their shoulders—would flood my thoughts until nothing else fit. Their faces became noise I couldn’t mute.

 

Even now, when I speak to folks, I close my eyes. Not to hide, but to draw the words in my head first—quiet lines on an inner page—so I don’t have to watch the feedback flicker across their faces: misunderstanding or worst…boredom. 

 

In college I refined the trick: tiny, precise sketches tucked beside lecture notes. A rocket for Newton’s third law, an emerald river for market economics. During exams, I’d close my eyes, flip to the image in my head, and the entire lecture unspooled—word for word, slide for slide. The drawings weren’t crutches; they were keys.

 

That system became the spine of everything I paint. A single canvas can demand hundreds of hours, but the time never drags. I listen—always. Books on tape, now every streaming title I can queue. While the brush moves, voices fill the studio: history, biography, physics, myth. In the years I commuted to downtown L.A., I’d finish a book on the drive in, another on the crawl home, and still have bandwidth for three more while painting through the night. Three books a week, easy. The stories braid into the pigment; the pigment carries the stories.

 

I don’t just see the image—I hear the lecture that birthed it, feel the freeway vibration under the words, smell the acrylic mixing with the narrator’s cadence. Each stroke is a citation, each layer a footnote. The canvas is the test I never have to take again; the grade is the silence when someone finally stands in front of it and forgets to breathe.

 

The imagery evolved from lecture-note sketches to acrylic on canvas paintings in the mid-1980s, a shift that felt less like a choice and more like a summons. I was wrestling with psychological fractures I couldn’t name aloud. I needed a psychiatrist but trusted none of them. So I asked the only one I believed in: the Great Physician. I spoke the request into the dark, half plea, half dare prayer to my Father in heaven.

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The help came the next few weeks in a general-education class. The assignment was simple: visit the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art). Bank of America, where I’d land a job a few years later, was sponsoring a split exhibition. One half of the gallery belonged to Matisse’s Jazz Series…the other half exploded with eclectic Pop Art: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist—bold, flat, unapologetic. A single wall divided them. You could not see one world while standing in the other.

 

I walked the Matisse Jazz Series, though the name stuck in my head like a wrong chord. One by one: cut paper, bold color, white ground. At first it felt like a cheat—construction paper on posterboard. It no way individually felt like historic magic. So I turned the corner into the Pop Art side: icons everywhere, Americana distilled into clean, comic-flat graphics, the same language I was drilling in design classes. I loved it instantly, the structure, the taste, the punch.