Art is a lifelong piece of my life, with drawing and oil painting lessons in my youth; beyond that I’m self-taught. Leonardo called the unstoppable, expansive gift of art cosa mentale, or “a thing of the mind.” I got a kick out of the similarities, the transience of time, glimpsed between my random snapshot and the Lucan Portrait, discovered 2008; and I hope you do too. Vinci is 52 miles from Lucca, my ancestral Tuscan home.