WRITING #2 Nature and Nurture: My cocktail mix in becoming an artist
Karen was a single, 19 -year old, when unexpected me, became part of her. Lady luck smiled, and for the next nine months she carried me along with her beautician duties at the hair salon, occasionally asking to excuse herself, tending to mild pregnancy nausea. As the calendar turned March 1966, she brought me to term and relinquished this new-born to Social Services. With $400.00 in her pocket, my birth-mother and her best friend pointed the Ford Mustang to the left. Shedding the cocoon of Minneapolis, these butterflies drove off to Southern California, never to return.
Within a few weeks, my adoptive parents got the anticipated call from the Social Service, “we have a little boy for you.” As loving and kind as these heroes were to me, I grew to quietly observe we shared no resemblance and found myself playing the role of “black sheep” artist in the family. Not only was I dying to know if there was someone in the world who looked like me, another internal question swirled inside, “…where did my creative curiosities come from? why those countless hours of solitude sitting in my bedroom drawing ? why that annual request from Santa for more Lego building blocks ? why that primal urge to nail scraps of wood to a tree? was its Nature or Nurture? my birth-mother had to be a creative, right” ? I imagined opening that adoption file one day to reveal a painter and a poet, cigarette in one hand, paint brush in the other. She would glow, drenched in sun-light pouring through the tall warehouse windows. There she was, a California love-child, staring at the canvas in a contemplative gaze. Yes, the clouds of that file would part, and all the answers would be revealed; “ahh, that’s my mom, I get it now, art is in my blood”.
In Minnesota, once age 18, adoptees can access their adoption files. On that birthday, I asked the social service to be a liaison, and to forward to my birth-mother a hand-written letter asking if she would be open to communication. Filled with emotion, she was eagerly receptive. A series of letter exchanges led to an eventual first meeting, and we have since stayed in touch for 30 years. And the adoption revealed the aforementioned description, right ? Not so much. While San Diego real estate requires its share of problem-solving handi-work, and Karen is a housing agent rock-star, my rose-colored vision was way off. “…art ? I don’t know where you get it Greg,” she commented during my first visit to her upscale Pacific Coast home.
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about Say yes quickly” Rumi, Sufi Poet
Shelving nature’s DNA card, I’m giving a slight nod to nurture, ironically born out of being in nature (see Writing #1 — my child-hood enchantment with the River Valley) That said, I can’t help but think this inner quest to communicate through sculpture is part of a Nature / Nurture cocktail mix. I suspect its ounce of adoption, a healthy shot of that child-hood studio called the river valley ravine, and yes, a splash of mom completes my shaken, not stirred equation.
We are all creatives. Karen empowered the right side of that gray-brain electricity to solve a problem. She found a way to bring an unplanned child to term, give him up to a couple who were in a place to care for him, and had the faith to go West and write a new chapter. This is masterful artwork to me.
