I've been with AAN in about every capacity since 1972...janitor (at first), artist, etc. until today as artistic director. I was born in Ayer, MA. My father taught cryptography for Army Security there at Fort Devens after working with the earliest forerunners of the computer, including Turing’s *bombe* at Bletchley Park, England, during WWII. My mother was a librarian and an oil painter who studied with Emile Albert Gruppé in Gloucester as a teen and with Philip Burnham Hicken on Nantucket in her later years. The code-breaking science of deciphering gibberish into plain text somehow has meshed with a penchant for deciphering the natural world with impressionistic imagery in my own painting, a craft I basically learned from my mother, tho in the mid-1970s I studied with Phil Hicken as well.