When I was in high school, I painted often. I loved oil painting and my school had a large, beautifully-lit studio where one could fully exercise the right side of the brain. For whatever reason, I enjoyed painting trains-- the sound, the speed, the motion. After graduation, I had no well-lit studio, college occupied my time, then it was travel and work in Africa and after that, more study and work in New York. Things didn’t improve with a move to Boston and some forty-plus years of immersion in the demanding and fascinating world of medicine and of teaching, directing courses and administering a medical school curriculum.

Nonetheless, I could feel the call to create art once again becoming more insistent. In 2011 I returned to drawing. My goal was to get back to painting, but it seemed clear that competence in drawing had to come before that. I took several years of drawing classes before venturing into pastels. And, from there, to watercolors.