Yon Douek

My mother and her mother were both artists. I grew up with their work on the walls, and some of my earliest memories are of lying in my parents' bed staring at a painting my mom made - a young boy and girl standing barefoot in a field, facing a barn.

Going into college I wanted a career in art, or writing, or music. My mom talked me out of it. Make a living first, she said; you can always do those things on the side. Around then I read that something like half of medical professionals keep some kind of artistic outlet, which felt like permission, so I took her advice and went to pharmacy school.

Doctorate in hand, I moved from my home in Brooklyn to Los Angeles for a career in biotech. I bought my first art supplies the same week. A Seurat at the Brooklyn Museum had taken my breath away only a month or so earlier, so I decided my first painting would be pointillist. It was every bit as tedious as I expected, hours every night for three weeks, and I loved it. There was a zen to it I hadn't felt anywhere else.

For the next one I wanted to work more traditionally - a painting of a camping trip I'd taken a few months before. I meant to lay a streak of pink across the clouds, touched a one-inch brush loaded with pink to the blue sky, and got a single dash. I was almost annoyed; I knew right then I wouldn't get the effect I'd planned. But I liked the look of that dash. So I painted another. And another. Then some darker blues, some yellows, and that was it. That painting became Generations, and the accident became dashillism, a style I've used in more than a dozen paintings since.

I've never taken a painting class or trained in any style. The painters I keep returning to are Van Gogh, Seurat, Miró, Dalí, Hopper, Klimt, and Hockney.

For years I mostly painted for myself, until friends and family started asking for commissions and the first few sales followed. Later I picked up oils, which turned out to be a different pleasure entirely. One of my favorites is a collaboration with my son, who was a year and a half old at the time - a six-by-five-foot fig leaf, with flashes of color that are entirely his. It's the first thing anyone sees when they walk into our house.