"The Creative Gene"

The very stylish new Cate School Bulletin recently asked me to write a short piece about the prevalance of painters in my family. (The painting above is a woodcut actually, by my mother, entitled "Birches.")

Heres a snippet:

• The point — if we must identify some influence, some monkey-see monkey-do element to growing up in the home of an artist — was the extraordinary stubbornness on display, the constancy involved in returning to the same room every day, closing the door and taking up those same nuts and bolts again, and again and again and again, surrendering to the same indomitable compulsion without complaint, without fanfare, without comment. Just being the tortoise instead of the hare, that was the point.

I provide two links: one to the article itself, the other to a flash version of the entire issue, which is dedicated to the arts at Cate. "The Creative Gene" starts on page 23, and includes more paintings by family members, including my aunt, Meredith Abbott, and my cousins, Robert Abbott and Whitney Abbott. But the whole issue is terrific and terrific looking. Congratulations to Sarah Kidwell and her right-hand man, Jarred Ray, for putting it all together.