The earliest existing piece of my artwork is a mug I made during a Christmas visit with my paternal grandmother, who was a professional ceramist. It has a sloppy blue handle and seven equally messy angels dancing around the badly cracked bowl with my name in her elegant scrolling handwriting. I was maybe five, and stood at her craft table with an apron tied around my neck. It now sits on my desk with pens and scissors in it as the cracks leak too much to drink out of it. 

My parents, a mix of Irish-American Catholic and Protestant families, were not big on church. I found myself as an adolescent going alone to the generic Christian service at the Army base we lived on. Angels were really important to me, I did complicated drawings of them with friendly faces and glorious halos and wings. Eventually, I moved on to teenager things - cigarettes, big hairdos, the Beatles.