Train in Perspective

c. 1972, age 5
Marker

When I was about four my family lived next-door to a commercial artist with three teen-age daughters who would often come over and babysit. Most of the time, we would all draw together. One day one of them said that she was going to show me how to draw a train. She began with a circle and some diagonal lines. "It doesn't look like a train," I said skeptically. But it didn't take long for me to realize what she was drawing—not the usual train profile, but a perspective drawing of a train coming toward the viewer. I was amazed. So profound was this event that I still remember it today. The drawing seen here dates from a year or so after that initial lesson.