I'm fairly certain from my grandparents mother's side. Grandpa used to be an avid landscape painter, of reasonable standing locally. Grandma having a pretty good feel for language, a poet, but obviously born in the wrong era to actually pursue a career as such. Since I strongly believe that feeling for language and feeling for imagery (as in: visual language) go hand in hand, I probably got the right combination of DNA.
You have a point. To reduce it to perhaps a simplistic level: the ability to feel emotional differences in words otherwise pretty interchangeable might have a logical continuity in visual thought, too.
Regarding your grandmother: my mother was born out of time as I sometimes feel that I was, too. She should have been afforded the opportunity of university and the pursuit of a literary career. She lived in books. She never got that. Only rich women got the break. Whether women have the greater genetic energy, or simply by virtue of being around more (in days of old they stayed home bringing up the kids) can exert the greater influence, it has always been the females who have impacted my life more strongly. Even my aunt, no blood relationship, was the one whose interest in
Vogue and
Harper's Bazaar got my young juices flowing fast and irreversibly, thank goodness. Male family has always appeared boring and without that buzz for life. Perhaps that, too, was conditioning. In evolutionary terms, maybe it makes sense that way: dull often means secure and better for family survival. Well, as insecure as my choice always was, at least the kids got to do what their different abilities allowed.
Perhaps we could measure some of the power or otherwise of this by asking ourselves whether, given the career choice again today, we'd do the same thing. If so, maybe it signals predisposition. Which has to be genetic, non?
