Did you know what career you wanted when you were in fifth-grade?

@4meAndyou They start with the career planning & classes in 9th grade now here. They’ve got meteorology classes and others. I suggested meteorology classes when they asked for suggestions in 1972 and they didn’t do it till this past decade. Probably because the National Weather Center is located here.

@cherokeepatti I don't remember anyone except my father asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and telling me I had to make a choice.

I was in high school art class when I finally decided I wanted to be an artist, because I was good at it and I loved it. I think I was a Junior then. My father fought me on it, and I became very confused about what I should do.

@4meAndyou Did you end up being an artist? It’s sad when parents want to dictate to their children what to do when they are adults. I worked with a woman who’s husband went to college and became a school teacher. He got a job as a coach at a high school and quit after two years. He ended being a line man for an electric company. I asked her why did he go to college for 4 years to do that. She said his mother was dead-set on him becoming a school teacher and he hated it badly. He could have majored in business and done a thousand things with that major.

@cherokeepatti I majored in graphic design, because my father insisted that was the only kind of art where I could make money. I hated that. I actually wanted to major in Sculpture. I had a huge talent, and the department head asked me to join his department. I knew my father would never allow it, so I switched majors again after two years, to Printmaking, because that was another field where my father said I could make money.

I never did anything with art to support myself. Everything you had to do to make money with art was a ruination of everything I loved about art.

I did eventually do some amateur lapidary work at home, tiny sculptures from rocks I found on the beach, and jewelry, and I took another class in jewelry at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School after I was an adult.

But my father was right. The first thing you have to do in life is earn money. I should have majored in science, just as he said, and I should have pursued sculpture as my hobby.

@4meAndyou I knew a woman who had a degree in commercial art and she was working service jobs. I asked her why with that degree and she said “You have to have a gimmick to succeed”...told her to get a gimmick. Maybe it’s not as easy as that but it takes creativity to come up with a gimmick and that’s a part of selling your art.

@cherokeepatti I had no joy in any part of graphic design or printmaking. None of it made me feel the sort of inner happiness that sculpture made me feel. And as an artist, even if I hated the sort of work I was doing, I was emotionally tied to it. So that if I got a job at...say...an advertising agency, I would have been crushed to pieces if they had hated my work.

@4meAndyou I had an art teacher in junior high who was a sculptor, she had majored in art and then became a teacher. She’d bring some of her sculptures to class on Fridays to show us. She had such a unique style that I could recognize her sculptures without seeing her name on them...once at a store window of a small art gallery and another time at the Oklahoma City zoo where she did sculptures of children in the butterfly garden. That is the mark of a true artist. She was really good with the eyes.