The Original Text
I never wanted to be anything other than what I am, an artist. As far back as I can remember — three or four years old — I used to draw using a chair as my desk. We were poor kids, and my parents never encouraged me. They would say, you can’t make a living making pictures. Yet, that was my dream — to paint and make a living at it. I wasn’t interested in anything else, and I’m still not today.
As a kid I learned to draw and paint by copying pictures from the Sunday section of The World, posters at my father’s grocery store, and later Saturday Evening Post covers.
When I was about ten, my twin brother and I used to watch a sign painter work. We would stand silently for hours marveling at how he used a flat brush and never made a mistake. After that, we got into the sign painting business ourselves. We painted a truck, a moving van, a gas station, and my father’s grocery store. I always insisted that his store should look like the A&P, but despite my best efforts of painting price tickets and building shelves, it never did.
