I was born in 1955, an inconvenient year, since the world already had enough children and certainly didn’t need another difficult one. I am the eldest of three, with two sisters orbiting my childhood like moons. My father was a businessman—serious and practical. My mother was artistic, impractical, and creative, which effectively eliminated any possibility of me becoming a banker. My grandmother was an interior designer who loved to paint, coaxing color onto canvas, while my father and uncles filled their homes with art, one of them even running an art gallery in San Francisco through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

As a child, I was gloriously chaotic and rebelliously solitary. I built tall, ambitious structures from blocks, erector sets, playing cards, and whatever else could be rescued from the trash. In the event of civilizational collapse, I could probably rebuild it—though no one sensible would trust my buildings to remain upright for long, since my civilizations were routinely obliterated by daily bombardments of clean-your-room. I drew constantly, mostly because paper never argued with me and could be stuffed away before adult judgment arrived.

By adolescence, my inner carnival was fully operational. Rock music blared. Psychedelic art slid off the walls. Pop and Op art hypnotized the adults. My grandmother responded by handing me enormous books from her considerable art library on the Impressionists, Modernists, and Abstract artists, as if art history might redirect my lava-lamp enthusiasm away from whatever it was that I was doing that I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I absorbed it all but leaned, predictably, toward the absurdity of the surrealists and the playfulness of abstraction. Romantic notions were charming; absurdity had better jokes.

Then, like so many restless dreamers, I wandered. I sailed. I climbed mountains. I skied down slopes. A degree in biology added another set of lenses: time carved into life and landscape, the long reach of paleobiology, the immense clockwork of history and science ticking on without regard for personal narrative.

At twenty-nine, I married. Four years later came a son, and two years after that, a daughter, thereby completing the societal checklist in proper order. The marriage lasted twenty-one years, long enough to prove to myself that I could commit and long enough to demonstrate that my patience has limits. After the divorce, my long-suppressed compulsion to create returned with enthusiasm, like a debt collector who never forgets, and I have been painting ever since.