Maybe that's what I've based my career on: getting up earlier than everyone else so I get an extra couple of hours.

I was always kind of naïve, and really needed to be given some direction.

The environment itself was culturally a vacuum, in that there was simply nothing that would inspire me in the arts. But my parents were always very supportive of anything that I explored or wanted to do.

In thinking back, not having any experience in any other elementary school, there may have been an advantage of being with different age groups to benefit from what they were learning in a more advanced capacity. With a small group like that, there was a lot of one-to-one teaching.

In a social studies class I did a paper on the history of Attica, which ended up being a little book that I created.

Christianity began in Palestine as an experience, it moved to Greece and became a philosophy, it moved to Italy and became an institution, it moved to Europe and became a culture, and it moved to America and became a business! We've left the experience long behind.

I was painting furniture, learning to stencil, and explore all kinds of traditional techniques of decoration. I learned from books that I picked up.