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Sunflowers dominate a tall bouquet, including daisies and echinacea

At the age of 50, with no formal training and no previous desire, I began painting. I recognized immediately that I loved it and was good at it - better than I’d ever been at anything. I was working in New York when my mother died of cancer. Broken by her death, and looking for anything that would help me put myself back together, I grabbed onto the idea of painting when it came to me out of the blue one day. Once I started, I recognized that I’d found what I was supposed to do with my life. Six months after my mother died, my boss, who was a dear friend, died. Four months later, the newspaper job I’d thought I would have forever was eliminated. A year later, I began painting full-time, starting with a cross-country trip to paint...