I passed the entrance examination for the College of Fine Arts. Acceptance offered a recognized path into the life I seemed to want, but before enrolling, I visited the college to see where and how I would be taught. During that visit, my desire to study there disappeared.

The decision did not come from contempt for knowledge. I knew that art required discipline and that technique could enlarge what the hand was able to do. What I feared was receiving a visual language before I had meandered into my own. A method learned too early might become an intermediary between experience and perception—so familiar that I would no longer notice it was there.

I imagined a woman farmer working beneath the burning desert sun. Could I still feel the life in her rough skin, dry lips, and sunburned, labor-worn hands? Could I paint her as a person whose work had entered her very body, or would I learn to arrange the correct colors while losing the force that had first made me look? I was afraid of producing an accomplished surface from which the living person had disappeared.

I chose not to attend. In doing so, I also chose uncertainty: no established sequence of instruction, no professional structure, no easy recognition, and no assurance that private instinct would ever mature into serious work. Yet I needed experience itself to remain my first teacher. The question was not whether method mattered; it was whether method could grow from close attention to the life before me rather than being imposed upon it in advance.

Without teachers, I had to find other forms of correction. A painting would have to show me where feeling had remained vague, where freedom had become carelessness, or where an image lacked inner order. Observation, repetition, and dissatisfaction became part of my education. I was not choosing an easier path; I was choosing one whose tests would come directly from the work and from life itself.

My education continued in another form. I began working in the kindergarten of a government organization and studied child psychology through reading, observation, and daily contact with children. They revealed how differently human beings enter the same world. What reached one child immediately might leave another untouched; what frightened one might awaken another’s curiosity. To understand them, I had to look beyond the expected response and attend to the child who was actually present.

I grew to love the children and longed for my own. I could not have known that this work was preparing me for the most demanding education of my life—one in which observation would have to become invention, and love would need to discover methods that did not yet exist.