The Giant and the Mirror.(how my art took hold)

Picture this: a quiet, shy kid slouched in the back row, never doing his homework, eyes half-focused on a lesson that may as well be in Sanskrit. The chalkboard is a blur. The only thing making sense is the doodle spilling across the margins of his notebook, blooming like a vine in spring. That kid? That was me.

On this particular day, the regular teacher was absent, replaced by none other than the principal—a towering, bearded figure who looked like he'd stepped out of Norse mythology. Naturally, I was trying to be invisible. No eye contact. No sudden movements. Just let the man do his thing and maybe I’ll survive the day.

But then… thud.

A giant finger lands on my doodled page. My heart stops. This is it. I’m done for.

But then comes a soft, unexpectedly gentle voice from the bearded giant above:
“That’s beautiful.”

Wait, what?

I dared to look up. His eyebrows had eased, and in his face was something I wasn’t used to seeing from authority figures. Approval? A moment of grace?

Then he added, with a warm grin:
“But you need to do the math, son.”

Fair enough. That was his job. But with just that small moment, he cracked open a door I hadn’t known existed. Maybe, just maybe, I had something to offer the world.

I never really found my stride academically, but art became my lifeline. The one thing I was good at. The thing that made sense. It became my identity. So when high school ended, the next step seemed obvious: art school.

I landed at OCA in the 1980s, which—if you weren’t there—was a bit of a hazy dreamworld. The vibe was: art is everything. Which, I eventually realized, meant art was also sort of nothing. If everything is art, then how do you actually see the world? I felt like I was living inside a mirror, endlessly reflecting myself.

That’s when it hit me: I needed to step out of the mirror. I needed a real job, a life. Something that meant something—not to the art world, but to people.

This turning point came after a profound personal loss: my mom passed away in 1993. Around that time, I was taking an anatomy course at a massage therapy school—not because I was planning a career shift, but because I thought it would help with figure drawing.

But to my surprise, I was captivated. The body wasn’t just skin and bones—it was an intricate, beautiful machine. Grieving and stressed, I tried the student massage clinic. It helped. A lot more than I expected.

And then it clicked: this could be the thing. A way to connect. To do something that mattered.

So I dove in. Trained as a massage therapist. Headfirst, no regrets. And I’ve loved this work ever since.

For a while, I thought I had left art behind for good. But after about 15 years, something started gnawing at me. Not regret, exactly—but incompletion. So I dusted off the old paint set.

This time, art wasn’t my identity. It wasn’t the thing I needed to prove I was worth something. It was just an old friend—someone I could share a life with.

Now, I have a family I love, a career I believe in, and that old easel still standing by my side. Not as a crutch. Not as a mirror. Just… there. Waiting for the next story to tell.