Hasta La Ideas

Since none of us are born into our careers, I’m always interested to hear how various creatives became what they are. You may be gifted with creative talent, but you make a series of choices that hone that talent into specific tools. On top of that there’s dumb luck and the curveballs life throws at you, and the way you choose to navigate those things. You’ll see me periodically doing origin stories on people across a variety of creative fields, with these articles geared towards students; because whether the person is an industrial designer, a multicreative like Becky Stern or a decorative painter like Benjamin Lai, there’s a commonality I would have liked to read about when I was choosing schools and making my own fateful choices. It’s about figuring out what your talent is, then deciding what the hell you’re going to do with it.

» Part 1: Introduction to the Finishes of Benjamin Lai
» Part 2: The Art and Science Behind Decorative Painting

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Ben Lai was raised by a single mom in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, with nothing in his surroundings to suggest he’d ever pick up a paintbrush or set foot in a Park Avenue residence. Growing up, role models were scarce; his father was not in the picture, and his mother put in long hours doing piecework in a garment factory to support him and his two siblings.

College seemed unlikely. The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan was not far away, but it’s safe to assume few people in that blue-collar neighborhood had ever heard of it or were keeping their fingers crossed for their child to apply there.

Where he lived, in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn, was an old-school neighborhood where kids could run around in streets absent the predatory criminals or speeding yellowcabs of 1970s Manhattan. Just on the other side of Jamaica Bay was JFK airport, but that may as well have been on the other side of the country. If you were a kid from Sheepshead Bay and you wanted to travel someplace far, you took the D-train.

If Ben never suspected he’d enroll at an art school in Manhattan, he surely never envisioned he’d subsequently hump it over to JFK to get on a plane bound for Belgium, and that what he found on the other side would change his life.

But yeah, that’s what happened. Here’s how.

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