Meet Tomie dePaola

At the age of four, Tomie dePaola announced, “I am going to be an artist when I grow up and I am going to write stories and draw pictures for books and sing and dance on stage.” After celebrating his 75th birthday, dePaola declares that not only has he achieved each of these goals, “I got paid for them, too!”

There was a time in dePaola’s life, however, when he was not so confident about his future. After graduating from Pratt Institute in 1956 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he thought he wanted to become a Benedictine monk and joined a small monastery in Weston, Vermont. “It wasn’t meant to be,” dePaola says. Instead, he moved to New York City and commuted to a college teaching position in Boston. Although he liked teaching and his students liked him, he says, “I never saw teaching as a career. I thought of it as getting money for rent.” Creating art was his passion and he struggled to make the dream a reality. More…