>> When I grew up -- I'm 58 now -- there wasn't a whole lot in this end of Brooklyn.
People from South Brooklyn didn't go to museums.
Our parents worked.
We didn't know.
So for me, what was cheap was to read and to draw.
And my father had this idea in his head -- my parents didn't get out of the fourth grade,
so he had this idea I was going to go to college, and college was free in the 1970s.
And I got into Brooklyn College, and I saw there was an art department.
And I had this idea in my head I was an artist.
I don't know where it came from.
Art was not something we talked about at home or thought about or anything,
so Brooklyn gave me the tools to maybe think about form
and how to build a picture or a design from the bottom up.
Even my banners are very solid; they're very rooted in tradition.
Years after I got out from Brooklyn, I went back for my MFA which is a terminal degree,
a Masters of Fine Arts, and I went to Queens College of CUNY,
which was a more perceptually based.
You look at something and paint from it.
And I think what that taught me was a little something about color.
Now, I've always loved drawing and I've always been able to see in black and white,
but it was a challenge for me to learn to work with color.