My first memory was looking at my mum’s freckled arm while we walked down granite steps and through a granite archway onto English Bay Beach

I can still smell the french fries and vinegar and the salty cedar logs lined up along the sand waiting for summer beach goers

I asked her 20 years ago about the babysitter that I had then

I was about 3

I told her I remember her name was Gabrielle

She told me that I never had a baby sitter

What?

Gabrielle I realized was an imaginary friend

We would walk to the corner store and buy chocolate bars

Or not

Years later I found myself stoned and staring at album covers placed carefully around the apartment, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, Umma Gumma by Pink Floyd, The Mothers of Inventions Weasels Ripped My Flesh and many others

I wondered who gets to make those pictures?

Designers and Illustrators

I rode my Motorcycle to Los Angeles from 800 miles north of Vancouver Canada in 1978 to go to Art Center and learn how to be an Illustrator

I was much older than my fellow students … 24

I lived in East LA then and learned a lot about Hispanic culture, the Dia de Los Muertos, grafitti and machaca too

moved to San Francisco in 1981

worked at the SF Examiner doing page design and made freelance illustration on the side

a very unique freelance assignment was offered to me in 1983

it was to make an illustration with a computer … the first Macintosh computer

I made the second editorial illustration ever published using that computer

I am still making illustrations today

though with a different computer and a different mind