I’ve been drawing since I was about 2 years old. My Mother, a prolific writer, kept a small stack of paper and a ballpoint pen where she sat at the kitchen table, I was perched near her in my high chair. From this unmovable station I watched her write. And for all the world had no clue what she was doing, except to see her leave endless markings on endless sheets of yellow writing paper.

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A small stick-like object in her hand would move across the empty paper and leave marks in its wake.

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I was, for lack of a better word, enamored with it. The strange little stick that left behind such lovely and magical lines.

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One day, she left me to answer a phone or perhaps pour a fresh cup of coffee. In that moment the object of my singular focus was at last in hand. I remember it being just an ordinary thing, a hard clear stick filled with a solitary vein of pure darkness. I thought of how she held it..and holding the table's edge with my other hand leaned into it...to see what I could do.

The stick, clenched tightly in my small clumsy hand moved across the clean shiny surface effortlessly.

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It danced across the naked steel top bakers table (that I sit at still to this day /across from her memory when having my meals.) leaving shapes and threads that came alive and were somehow connected to an unnamed and spirited source I could barely imagine.

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I'm not so sure to this day if I pushed it or if it pulled me.

Or both.

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Lines became shapes and those became things.

I was mesmerized.