My grandfather is a legend. Maybe every granddaughter says that, but not every little girl has a whole community to back her up on it. For years, my Papy and my grandmother ran a candy-stationary-tackle-souvenir-odds-and-ends store on the town square of a small village in Brittany, France. He sold pens that never made mistakes and candy which he claimed to have imported personally from Chicago--after all, it doesn't get much more exotic than the windy city!

It was my grandfather's face that got me interested in portraiture. And it was something he once said to me that led me to be a painter. He told me that "painters, they see things."