DEVELOPMENT OF AN ARTIST | Artistic Roots

Our childhood experiences fundamentally shape the adults we become, helping to determine who we are, what we care about, and what we are drawn to conceptually and aesthetically. Looking back into your past to identify pivotal, formative experiences and then using those experiences to trace the manifestation of your identity in your work can be very illuminating.

FAIRY TALES

Einstein famously advised that reading lots of fairy tales to children would ensure the development of intelligence and creative imagination. This collage (right) features influential books from my childhood. I am pictured here at age three. Childhood photo by Ken Clare.

I grew up in a Victorian house in Montclair, New Jersey, the eldest of four sisters. My earliest memories are of trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Big Apple Circus, and the Central Park Zoo and Carousel, as well as elaborately designed themed birthday parties, and bedtimes filled with Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Aesop’s Fables, and Greek mythology. The imprint of these childhood experiences on my own work seems obvious in hindsight, but it wasn’t until later in my career that I connected this thread that had been with me since my very first photography class.