Entering the artist life

I’ve been drawing since some of my earliest memories. Buckingham Fountain in Chicago. I was obsessed with it as a 5 year old. I drew it over and over. Those of you familiar with the large Grant Park water feature know it has three phases: Resting, high spout, and high spout with colored lights. I drew them all, multiple vantage points in different light conditions. I was drawn into it like some sort of idiot savant, and I memorized every detail. Still recsll them in my mind to this day… it is so entrenched within the most resilient neurons of my brain. I now forget names of people I met two minutes ago, but I remember the fountain’s three tiers of curved arches of water, with a pedestal bowl in thr center with a circular shoulder of spray, which emitted a rocketing spire of water from the center. At the periphery were weird creatures emerging from the water surface with their snake shaped bodies and horselike heads with a distinctive arched necks which I frenetically replicated with each crayon drawing. I was proud of that shit. I even tried to sell those crumpled sheets of paper. Thatvwas when my 7 yr old sister took a cart full of silverware, plates and cookware outside of our apartment, unsupervised and without permission, and sold many of them to passersby , much to my parents’ dismay when discovered. I remember having put my drawings on the cart in order for them to be sold. When she came back with my irate parents, all my art was still there. They were the few things that weren’t bought, and I was sad that they weren’t wanted: I was five years and already a dejected artist.