Not long after I began painting, I had the strong urge to paint people. Susan Manders, my teacher, suggested the best way to start painting people was to paint ten self portraits. Her advice was to consider these self portraits “studies” and not to be attached to the results. Susan suggested painting these in the privacy of my home and to avoid showing them to people. She said that the way that people would react could impact my freedom to paint these studies. Over the years, I have kept these self portraits but they are stored on a high shelf in a closet. Some of these early renditions of faces, my own face, are so cartoon-like that they are very amusing to see now in retrospect.