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Really, no one as a child. My sister Shirley and I were tight, so she may have in some way. It was just that I had such confidence, and I knew the nuns didn't know what it meant. They never said, "He should be an artist." That's because I don't think, from their point of view, it was a positive thing to be. Only when I got out of the military and went to art school did I first receive encouragement. I was in painting class, a guy named Louis Rittman told me, "Never stop painting." He had lived in Giverny, where Monet had been, so he was sort of influences by Impressionism. He saw I had talent. But, honestly, I already knew I was going to be a painter. 

I just want to go back to the tree, because that tree is lodged in your mind as the starting point. What I want to ask you is what kind of psychological effect, if any, did that rejection have on you?

It probably helped me, because it was obvious that my copy was better. So the rejection helped prepare me for the rest of my life to be rejected, but it also taught me that I had talent. It also helped when I did my first self-portrait in 1947. I did it as home, but I was in art school at the time. It was rejected from the Art Institute of Chicago, and it wasn't even put into the student show. I was just twenty-one, but I was confident in my abilities. I knew it was good. I think that may be way some people think I'm arrogant even today, because I've been confident all these years. Some years after the portrait was done, Reginald Lewis wanted to buy it, and that kind of reaffirmed things for me. I think that inner confidence, even in the face of rejection, is something all artists have to have, otherwise why continue working?

Were you drawing throughout high school/

No. When I was in high school, the war came, and then, I didn't even finish high school. 

When the war came, what happened to you?

I went into the Air Force for twenty-five months. I wanted to be a pilot but didn't make it. That was a dark moment in my young life. I was qualified to be a gunner. But they didn't have black gunners in the Air Force then, so they put me into the aviation engineers, which was really a labor outfit. But the sergeant who looked over my records decided I had another aptitude, and so I started out as a clerk.