Molly is a good friend of mine and has been helping me achieve the dream of Wireman for ten years! She is our art director and responsible for hiring all our artists and overseeing their work as well as for the creative direction of the comic. Molly is an amazing, talented artist in her own right (both in painting and illustration), and head of the illustration department at Kendall College of Art and Design where she is an associate professor on the faculty.

I realized I wanted to be an artist in the spring of my kindergarten year.

The teacher passed out sheets of paper with a curved line and the numbers 3 and 4 = mimeographed in blue at the bottom. She asked us to draw 3 red flowers and 4 yellow flowers, count them, and then complete the math.

Eighteen finished pages were hung in a row above the chalkboard. Some of the equations were correct, a few were wrong, but all of them had red then yellow flowers following that blue curve.

I watched, waiting for mine to go up. I knew mine would be special. And there it was: yellow, red, yellow, red, and yellow, red, yellow. Seven flowers, each with two perfect green leaves, evenly spaced on a fat green line. Balanced, perfect.

But then, another paper went up. There were the required 3 red and 4 yellow flowers, but they danced randomly across the face of a green hill. No two were alike. They had pink and orange and violet centers. Blue rain slanted across a yellow sun.

I don’t know if I knew the words for imaginative or creative, but I knew that math assignment was the work of an artist.

I knew I wanted that.

So, I try.

Read about the next artist.