I loved camp because it let me leave behind at least for a few weeks a year the persona I was during the school year. Nobody at camp knew that I was the girl who couldn’t do art. I couldn’t’ draw or paint or sketch. I didn’t doodle in my free time.
In 1964 when I was 9 years old, I worked on the “red tie” and had to complete a sketch to finish the Arts and Crafts requirement. I didn’t know at all where or how to begin. Letty, Lenore Townsend, was the Arts and Crafts counselor who sat with me and told me to start with a horizon line, and then explained what that was. Within a few weeks, I had her signature on my tie requirement line for a sketch. I had gone to the Outdoor Chapel and sketched it – with a horizon line. My mother, a Hagan Hag, framed it and had it hanging in my family’s house for the rest of her life.
Letty took me to a world I didn’t know I could enter. She drew her self-portrait for me and I kept it all these years. Note the horizon line.
Letty – self- portrait