Once upon a time my brother and I hitchhiked from Sacramento, California up over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, across the desolate Nevada landscape, through the Utah alkali flats, into the Rocky Mountains to Laramie Wyoming, and then down into Denver Colorado.Okay. We lucked out and got one ride with this guy who was on his way to Chicago. But on the way back we got many rides, and we went south out of Denver, through Colorado Springs to Cortez, where we spent the night with a good Samaritan, and then continued on the next day to the four corners, picked up highway 160 out across a Navajo reservation toward Tuba City, then dropped south to Flagstaff, where we picked up interstate 40 and took it on into Los Angeles. Then we continued getting rides up the California coast, riding in the back of a pickup at sundown on Highway One until we ended up at our grandmother’s place in Piedmont, which is a suburb of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area. This all took place in the dead of winter. It was so cold that in the car with the good Samaritan, going over the mountains out of Colorado Springs toward Cortez, our breath was freezing and floating in crystals in the air and there was ice on the inside of the windows.My little brother was a budding artist at the time, and he began to make his living doing carpentry work. He had not taken to school so when he finished high school that was it. He never took classes on how to do his art. He taught himself lithography, painting, and sculpture. He became a friend of the Washoe tribe in Northern California and did murals for them. He put together his career in carpentry with his identity as an artist and started making custom doors. The man is uncommon. He became a true artist — someone with a creative mind and a unique perspective on the world. You can see what he has been creating if you go to www.woodartdoors.com and then click on the various pictures. If you click on his image above the words ‘art gallery images’, it will take you to photos of his work, including paintings in various media, prints, sculptures, woodcarvings, and beaded objects. When I look at that stuff, I find myself muttering, “Wow, man. You are the real thing.”And he LOOKS like the real thing. Just how should an artist appear, though? My brother has had long hair gathered at the back and hanging down his back for decades. His full, walrus moustache is grey now. His skin is leathered from working in the sun, and you can see crow’s feet and smile wrinkles carved into his face. I think the two of us should rent Harleys and ride down the street together. Someone should take a picture of it.I know. He is my brother. I’m not supposed to plug him, but this is far less a plug for him than it is a rather spontaneous overflow of my admiration. I think I would feel this way if he were not my brother but I knew what I knew about him, the difficult life he has lived, and who he has become as a person.Part of how I am feeling right now is that I learned that somehow the San Francisco Art Institute found out about him. They have given him an award for his portfolio and a substantial scholarship to take classes there. So, part of me is laughing because my little brother (who is actually bigger and taller than I am and has been now for some time) is going back to school — and what a school, what a tradition, and what a company for him to keep.Founded in 1871 by artists, writers, and community leaders who possessed a cultural vision for the West, the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) became a locus for artists and thinkers. Three years later, SFAA launched The California School of Design, which was renamed California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in 1916 and then the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961.During its first 60 years, influential artists associated with the school included Eadweard Muybridge, photographer and pioneer of motion graphics; Maynard Dixon, painter of San Francisco’s labour movement and of the landscape of the West; Henry Kiyama, whose ‘Four Immigrants Manga’ was the first graphic novel published in the US.; Sargent Claude Johnson, one of the first African-American artists from California to achieve a national reputation; Louise Dahl-Wolfe, an innovative photographer whose work for ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ in the 1930s defined a new American style of “environmental” fashion photography; John Gutzon Borglum, the creator of the large-scale public sculpture known as Mt Rushmore and numerous others.As SFAI celebrates its 140th anniversary, faculty, students, and alumni continue to investigate and further define contemporary art and the role of artists in today’s global society. Their accomplishments can be found in museums and galleries around the world, in bookstores and movie theatres, online, in the civic sphere, and elsewhere: from Catherine Opie at the Guggenheim to Enrique Chagoya at the Berkeley Art Museum to Kehinde Wiley at the National Portrait Gallery; from Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning ‘The Hurt Locker’ to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s acclaimed documentary ‘!Women Art Revolution’ (from the website http://www.sfai.edu).My brother was an artist before someone gave him an award for being an artist. I don’t think he could have been anything else. He is true to himself — what my existentialist friends call “authentic”.I don’t think very many people actually think about being authentic. I think a lot of people are caught in the current of current events, the struggle to make money or keep money, and the need to succeed, and they are just looking for the next advantage, the next opportunity. People want to seal the deal. They want to get somebody’s vote. They want to sell, and in order to sell they have to package themselves, which means they have to appeal to the person they are attempting to win over and make themselves look like something other people want.If a person cannot be true to themself then in the end what has he or she become? Duplicity and hypocrisy exact a toll. Drifting without reflection seems like poverty. It is important to know oneself and to be oneself — honest to God.