First oil painting: Age 8

A small town doesn't offer many resources for art supplies or art lessons.

When I started drawing obsessively at 6 or 7, Dad made me an easel for Xmas and after the holidays took me down to the local newspaper, the East Washingtonian, to buy a ream of newsprint. It was dark late afternoon,  and we entered the EW building to a bright  clatter of press and oily reek of printer's ink. The owner, Mr. Red Bunch,  in his greasy apron and quiff of bright red hair, came up to greet us, and when Dad told him what we needed, Red went to the back room and returned with the newsprint.  We thanked him and then we trotted home in the fading light, a little girl in pigtails trying to keep up with her father's longer stride.  (We walked everywhere in those days.  A town of 1,000 people isn't very spread out.)

Dad immediately set me up in the family room with my uncle Bert's drawing board, my new easel and my new set of pastels.  A clip held my pad of newsprint, and I got to work. Every day after school, I would have a snack and go to work on my latest obsession...mostly images of horses.  I had a Walter Foster book of How to Draw Animals, and that would be the extent of my art instruction...books...until I went to college.  I would whip out a drawing/pastel, take it off the easel and go out to the kitchen where my mother was fixing dinner.  She'd tell me it was fabulous, much as she did when I was learning to swan dive at the local pool in the summer....again and again, I would show her, and she would tell me it was terrific and I would go back to do it again.   (Needless to say, we didn't have TV.  Television didn't come to Pomeroy until I was about 12.)
When I was eight, I got an oil set and cardboard backed canvases for Xmas.  Again, I had no instruction other than to use turps for cleanup.  I pushed paint around for several hours, and even to my eight year old eyes it looked pretty crude. When I showed my painting to Uncle Bert, who had just graduated from Berkley with a minor in art, I complained that it "didn't look real".  He looked at it carefully, and gravely told me that it had strong feeling and that that was "the most important thing.  Your skills will come later."

I think that was very good advice. 

Here's a scan of my first painting, and a small watercolor I did on site last summer of my sister's backyard.  She still lives in Pomeroy, and her house backs up against one of the hills surrounding the town.  I talked to her last night and she said five deer...3 does and 2 fawns were walking in a line along her fence.  No doubt with an eye on her tomatoes.