b. 1918. From the outset, she was interested in art and keenly observant. At the age of 5, she recognized that the dots of color in the comic strips, when fused by vision, produced secondary hues and began to make drawings composed entirely of colored dots, a sort of self-taught French Post-Impressionist in the manner of Seurat and Signac. At the age of 9 she began a project that would occupy her into her late teens, illustrating the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Her dedication to a single project would inform her work for the rest of her life.

Bored with high school, she dropped out. In 1934, when she was 16, in order to prove to her mother that she was nonetheless an educated person, she took and passed the entrance examinations to the University of Chicago. But she did not enter school. Within a year she had a one-person show of paintings at the Boulevard Gallery in Chicago. As a result of this show, she was invited by the Mexican Government to paint in Mexico. The invitation resulted in a well received 1936 exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. She was eighteen years old.