When I was a preteen, Dadbo brought home a carload of aerospace magazines from work. Did I cut out all the cool pictures of rockets and supersonic aircraft? No… I cut out and saved the marketing symbols and corporate trademarks. I can’t explain it, but I always had an affinity for letters and graphics (the GE emblem on the refrigerator intrigued the heck out of me), but I had no clear comprehension of either the fine or applied arts, any sense of the distinction, or what an artist actually did for a living, other than maybe draw cartoons, paint signs, or think up a few crazy advertising ideas like Darren Stevens. My junior high art teacher had worked as a commercial artist before switching to art education. She didn’t actually instruct me in any specific graphic arts techniques, but I did gain one valuable thing from her—she made sure I understood that commercial art was a viable aspiration for a talented person. But there was something else between the lines, as though it was our secret, this notion that commercial art wasn’t exactly noble, that it wasn’t real art. Hmmm, so what was real art? Didn’t have a clue. Norman Rockwell? For petesake I didn’t even realize who Bob Clampett and Ralph Bakshi were poking fun at when they created a cartoon character called Go Man Van Gogh (the wild beatnik artist on “Beany“). I just knew that I was fascinated by comics and advertising art and loved to study lettering and draw words as pictures. I remember painting the word “ICE” with watercolors, adding the archetypical mounds of snow and ice-cycles around the letters. It was almost a right of passage. Weird, eh? I had four different art teachers in four years of high school. I hate to be unkind but each one of them was worthless. I had talent, so there was no reason to spend time with me. It was more important to babysit the goof-offs who took art as a “cake” elective. No wonder I sent off for the Famous Artists home test. I don’t think I even realized how desperate I’d become. What others might have viewed as crass merchandising was a Godsend for me. The individual attention I got from instructors in far-off Connecticut was something I’d never experienced before. And even though the course introduced me to both the fine and applied arts, there was something about commercial art that made me feel at home. When I saw the classes offered by UC I didn’t get the same electricity from reading about figure drawing, painting, or printmaking like I did from discovering that I could take design fundamentals, typographics, photography and film/animation. I was pumped! I wanted to go to college so bad I turned cocky and couldn’t wait to blow my hometown and head for the big city…