My art of every form was always therapy. I guess that's why mother was so offended by my sketch diaries when she found them. We were moving again (my dad was in the service) and she found a stack of them in my closet. I wasn't hiding them, mind you; she knew I was always sketching, she just never bothered to look at the diaries before. But, some drawings she found offensive and "telling tales," and the rest were "just old stuff," so she threw them all out. The were full of notes too, lines I set down as direction for how a drawing was developing – which someone later let me know were poetry.

She did that and then presented me with three new sketch diaries which, I guess, she thought excused what she'd done. Maybe it did in her mind. She didn't have a creative impulse and never could understand what it meant to me.