<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Okay, so let's, so you graduated from high school about, what? 1980?

JO: Uh-huh, 1980.

TI: And this was from which high school?

JO: Rolling Hills High School.

TI: Okay, Rolling Hills, and then after that you went to college? Where'd you go to college?

JO: I went to Yale.

TI: And what was your field of study at Yale?

JO: I ended up majoring in art, and I hadn't taken a lot of art classes before. Actually, I hadn't taken any. I don't think I'd ever taken any art classes when I was a child. And I remember my first year at Yale, I took a drawing class, and I remember I got an A-plus, and I was just, I think I got an A-plus because I was very unschooled and there was something very free about the way that I drew. I really didn't know what I was doing, so maybe, it was something sort of free and very naive and childlike about the work that I did, and I didn't know anything about perspective, but I had something which I guess the instructors saw, and I just really liked, I liked drawing. And then I took a sculpture class and I just, I fell in love with the figure and working in clay.

These were all new things for me, so it's really, I mean, my experiences at Yale were just, they were really wonderful. I spent most of my time, once I decided that I wanted to pursue art, in the studio, and then my junior year I started taking painting, which was much harder for me than sculpture. Sculpture for some reason came very, fairly easily. I actually recently got in touch with my old sculpture professor, I think my first aesthetic imprint was made by this man. And we learned how to look at the figure, or we learned how to see by looking first at a bone. You have no preconception of what a bone looks like. It was maybe a thigh bone from a cow or something, some sort of animal. And we looked at it, it was on a stand, and you just look at what you see, and then you draw the lines, and you sort of rotate and you draw it and 360 degrees, and you just look. And then you try to use that same way of seeing on a head. And I think normally if you, you would, if you were told to sculpt a head, you would make what you thought a head should look like. But we used that same way of seeing, which is very abstract, to look at the lines on the head, and then... so that was sort of how I learned to look, and it was very abstract. And then you got to the figure and used that same method of look, just look, look at the lines and look at the curves and how things move through space. And I was just fascinated by that, and I thought it very absorbing. And then I started painting, and I just loved the stuff of paint.

The friend that I'm going to see on Bainbridge Island, we started painting together the same year, and she always painted -- she was making the kind of paintings that I've always wanted to make, and we were always sort of looking at each other's work. But I, I love color, and just the material of paint, oils, and I loved painting more, but technically I wasn't as adept at it, and that, I think, ultimately was what frustrated me, but it's what I, I continued to pursue painting for a few years. I started grad school in painting.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.