The short answer to the question, "why was I chased by a mob?" is because I made art that people didn't like.

Why?

I don't know.

Maybe it's because, when I was a kid, I never dreamed about being an artist. I mean, why bother? The countless stories about starving artists are enough to put anyone off. So when I started university, I was practical and studied political science.

But then one day, a friend showed me a book filled with the paintings of Salvador Dali. Dali's surrealistic pictures captivated my imagination and the more I looked at his art, the more I believed that if Dali could earn a living as an artist, then I could too. So the next day I bought some art supplies and started to draw.

I soon became obsessed. In fact, I became so obsessed that I lost interest in political science and seriously thought about studying art. But since I was still haunted by the stories of starving artists, I didn't. Instead, I compromised and studied the psychology of art. I figured that if I failed to earn a living as an artist, I could always be a psychologist.

As part of my psychological education, I volunteered at Canada's first art therapy clinic which was founded by Kathleen Collis in Victoria, Canada. My role was to hand out art supplies to long-term psychiatric patients at the start of art therapy sessions. During these sessions, patients painted pictures or made sculptures and the sessions always ended with every patient describing how their artistic creation represented an experience in their life.

I also took a university fine art course taught by John Dobereiner, Don Harvey, Pat Martin-Bates, and Roland Brenner. From them, I learned that anything could be used to make art.

And when I wasn't studying, I spent countless hours copying cartoon characters from newspapers, satirical magazines and underground comix. Eventually I submitted some of my own original drawings to my university's newspaper. One of those drawings, entitled Show Business, was published in the UVic Martlet in 1974.