The hammock hung between two trees at the edge of the lake, and I remember stopping its slow sway so the world could hold still for a minute. I lifted my hands into the warm light and saw them — really saw them — as mine for the first time. Ten-year-old hands. Clumsy, bitten nails, a scratch across my knuckle. And yet, for the first time, I felt a quiet shock:

These hands are mine. No one else’s.

It wasn’t a sentence I thought — it was a realization that arrived without words. Maybe that was fitting. Words had never fully cooperated with me anyway. My voice would tangle and stall, my thoughts piling up behind my teeth with nowhere to go. Feelings needed a different escape route. And slowly, without knowing it, I’d begun sending them down my arms, into my fingers, into the things I made.

Those hands became my first true language.

Someone must have seen that — my fifth-grade teacher, who wrote something on my report card about artistic talent. Just a line or two, nothing grand. But my mother read it and did what she always did when faced with something unknown: she walked toward it. Before long I was spending Saturdays at the Rhode Island School of Design, the littlest art student taught by real artists. Three summers. Three portfolios still tucked under my bed like bottled messages from that boy to the man I’ve become.

And my mother — she was the one who taught me to meet fear head-on, even before I knew that was what I was learning. She didn’t dramatize it. She didn’t preach. She simply created circumstances in which I would discover my own courage — with her standing close enough for me to feel safe, yet leaving the moment to me.

My first real lesson came before the lake house, when I was eight or nine and afraid of drowning. So she enrolled me in swimming classes at the YMCA. We were late the first day — I can still feel that small panic of being behind everyone else. The registration man led us into the locker room, the class already underway beyond a swinging door, and told me to take off all my clothes.

All of them.

Then he pointed to that door and told me to walk through it.

I was nine — becoming self‑aware — bare skin, bright lights, and a room I couldn’t yet see. All the other kids already together on the other side. That was fear, not dramatic but the quiet kind that settles in your stomach and whispers, You don’t belong here.

And my mother? She didn’t shield me or argue. She trusted something inside me I didn’t yet know I had. She let me face the door. And step through.

And I did.

When I stepped through the door, I discovered that every other boy in the class had already gone through the same humbling ritual. We were all equally vulnerable, all trying to act like it was nothing. The relief that flooded through me was almost funny — a deep exhale I didn’t even know I’d been holding. At least I wasn’t alone.

That moment, as painful as it was, planted something in me. Courage didn’t mean not being afraid. It meant moving anyway. It meant discovering you could survive the crossing. My whole life since has been a long conversation with that lesson — so much so that years later there would be a section on my résumé titled Performance Art, and many of the pieces would begin with the same phrase: Confronting the fear of…

But I didn’t learn bravery from her alone.

I had two extraordinary parents.

My father was an artist who never needed the word. He lived creativity the way most men breathe. His hands were trained by uncles who taught him to build, and his spirit refused the idea of working for the man. He taught me — not by lecture, but by example — to have the courage of my convictions. To live life on my own terms. To trust that imagination was not foolishness, but fuel.

There were family stories about him painting the steeple of the First Baptist Church at seventeen, swinging from a bosun’s seat high above the town — as if danger and beauty could fit together in the same gesture. And then there is the memory I treasure most: my brothers and I building a deck on the concrete foundation we had poured. When we finished, he placed a chair in the middle of it and sat down. Just sat — quiet, thoughtful, present.

“What are you doing?” we asked.

He didn’t answer right away. He stayed seated there a moment longer, as though he didn’t want to disturb the fragile shape of the idea forming in front of him. Then he turned toward us with a small, contented smile.

“I’m dreaming it up,” he said.

That was my inheritance: a mother who taught me to walk straight toward fear, and a father who taught me to dream my life into being. Hands that became my voice. A lake that became my mirror. A hammock where, for the first time, I lifted my hands into the light and realized not just that I existed — but that I was me. Unique. Singular. Bound to these hands, this heart, these parents, this path.

I’m 76 now. I can see that boy clearly — shy in speech, strong in spirit — standing at the edge of the lake and at the beginning of himself. And I can see the two people standing behind him, holding the door to the world open in the only way they knew how:

Face your fears.
Trust your hands.
Dream your life into being.

With parents like that, how could I not become an artist?