Une Envie de Sel

Me, at an indeterminate age...maybe five-ish? I grew very tall very fast, and my hair went from a short afro to very, very long in what seemed like the blink of an eye, so it's hard for me to tell if the photos aren't dated.
I'm not even sure what I'm doing in this photo, but it looks like something creative, judging by my level of concentration. I was big into drawing, in imitation of my creative parents.
What I can tell you about this time in my life is that my father was often in the studio - and he always had a big studio. He liked to work on enormous canvases, which he designed and stretched himself. Often, the canvases were double or in triptych. He worked in oil or acrylic, blocking of precise sections with pieces of masking tape which he cut into sculptural shapes with a matt knife. Sometimes, he would fill in the blocked-out sections with meticulously-applied and carefully-distressed gold leaf.
My father's studios were large and spacious, with high, swooping ceilings and artfully-placed windows. He was able to do this because, at this stage, he designed our houses himself. He had that much talent. He could draft and execute houses as easily and deftly as he painted, as easily as he created massive sculptures out of carved wood, brushed steel, or lost-wax bronze. He was a tireless worker, and could fix fences on our ranch as well as climb into the rafters and assist in the construction of the houses he'd designed. One of our Woodstock houses was as eloquent and free-form as his sculptures, complete with butterfly-style roofs, freeform decks, and a cement floor in his studio which morphed into hardwood for the livingroom, with its long, rough-hewn dining table. In that house, he anchored a rope swing in the ceiling midway between studio and dining area - a heavy hemp rope with a huge knot at the bottom, so that I could swing from the far end of the studio to the open kitchen without obstruction.
What a lucky child I was - surrounded by all that openness and creativity.