The past couple of weeks have left me feeling deeply grateful — my son is home from the hospital and healing, my family is steady, and it’s that time of year when the world leans a little closer to the warm side. But that swell of gratitude led me somewhere unexpected. Not just toward the people I know and love, whom I try to thank often, but toward the ones who’ve shaped me from a distance. Artists and storytellers who don’t know I exist, yet nudged my imagination into the shape it has now. It may seem like an odd project, but I’ve been trying to honor them too. Thank-yous to the ones who helped build me.
And when I try to trace where their influence began, I always end up back in childhood. I was the kid who treated library books like treasure pulled from some hidden hoard. I remember first grade — maybe even earlier — wandering into the library, dropping to the carpet, and paging through towers of picture books. I could only bring home two, which meant a solemn ritual of choosing the ones worthy of a two-week stay in my world. They had to be the sort of books I’d open again and again, as if they held secret doors only I could find.
I didn’t know it then, but I was collecting mentors.
Looking back, I can see the early influencers: Ezra Jack Keats, Lois Ehlert, Maurice Sendak, Evaline Ness. Their textures were spells. I traced their shapes with my fingertips, convinced the colors and cut-paper edges contained some kind of magic. Their abstraction didn’t confuse me — it widened the doorway. My imagination sprinted through.
Later came Donald Silverstein, Norman MacDonald, and Charles Schulz, whose lines refused to sit still. Schulz especially. Whenever we managed to get a Sunday paper, I went straight for Snoopy like a pilgrim with a single destination. By ten, I could draw every Peanuts character, and one year I copied nearly all of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Those wiggly-lined people felt alive in a way realism never quite managed for me. Their drawings moved, even though they were only lines on paper.
Adulthood brought its own guild of storytellers: Norman Rockwell, Charles Wysocki, Alan Lee. Masters of narrative alchemy. Wysocki’s cat prints made me squeal the first time I saw them. Each one was its own little mystery — a whole story tucked into a pantry, sewing room, or garden shed. Even the pretend book titles were tiny jokes waiting to be found. And Alan Lee… I’ve spent hours studying his pencil work like an apprentice lightly haunting a master. He makes sketches feel ancient, as if stepping into them might drop you into a myth older than memory.
So this is my way to say thank you — to these artists and the many others who raised me through their pages. They taught me that color and shape can be more powerful than literal accuracy, that wit can ride the curve of a line, that an illustration can feel like a novel if you let the shadows breathe. They shaped my eyes, and in many ways, they shaped my hand.
I carry their lessons into every piece I make.
P.S. I’ve written two other gratitude posts recently on Substack to my audience and to my online influencers. Please check them out if you’re so inclined!
