"It's Always Best To Start At The Beginning..."

  To those of you who happen across this page,welcome! This is my first ever attempt at doing a blog page,so bear with me. While racking my brain to think of what to do for the first posting,I happened to remember a line from 'The Wizard Of Oz" where Glinda,the Good Witch gave Dorothy a sage line of advice in starting her trip to the Emerald City......."It's always best to start at the beginning,and all you do is follow the Yellow Brick Road". For those of us whose passion is art,we can all appreciate the plight of Dorothy and her travails in getting to Emerald City.We choose our individual discipline(s) and work with dogged determination to learn and master new skills to reach the ultimate goal of being the absolute very best artist we can possibly be.
  Regardless of what level we are,be it the budding novice,intermediate or accomplished professional,one thing we have in common is that we can all trace our artistic journeys back to their humble beginnings.I am about to give away my age here,but that's okay! For myself,the beginning came at the age of two way back in 1968.The first handful of my years was spent as a navy brat moving around to my father's stations of duty.At that fateful location,we lived next door to an older couple named the Robinsons. Red was a World War 2 veteran who worked for the postal service,and was a very personable and jolly man. Every time we paid them a visit,he would seat me at their kitchen table,give me a small glass if iced tea,take out some pencils and paper and get me to draw a cat,a dog,a house,a car or any general object for him. He would patiently work with me showing me how to draw different things.His lessons stuck with me through the years as I started school and graduated into drawing dinosaurs,spaceships and eventually people and animals. My big regret is that I did not stick with it in rigid continuity,but I always came back to it eventually. Now that I am older,I find that art has become an inseparable passion for me and I owe all of it to an old man who profoundly affected my life. He has long since passed,but I can only hope that my works have done him proud!
  So,other than the anecdote of my personal beginnings with pencil and paper,what can we take away here? Maybe that at one time or another we are all Dorothy,but we can also be Glinda in that through our kindly patience, a youthful mind may be profoundly set at the beginning of their own Yellow Brick Road in the search for their Emerald City!