I Want to Take You Higher

Sly Stone
10.5" x 8.5", oil on wood, 2014

The year must have been 1969, I was five years old and it's when I had my first experience of art criticism. My sister, who was then ten, was coloring in a coloring book. She complained about how you could see lines when she tried to color in an area. I suggested she should color in circles. I could not have known that I would, forty-five years later, be doing just that while painting an afro. I had never seen an afro, not even heard about it, yet I Want to Take You Higher by Sly and the Family Stone was already released, and a big hit at that, but I don't think it made it onto Toppop, the hit TV show on Dutch television that my older siblings watched religiously. I could sense though that I was to become an artist. I could draw cars better than anyone in class and my father too. "Boom laka laka laka boom."