For Mar Goman, art is what you make out of the materials you have at hand. “I call myself a multimedia artist,” she says. “The media itself isn’t as important as what you make out of it. I’ll use found objects, old paper, fabrics and rusty metal. I go to junk shops and antiques shops and even old garbage dumps.”

Most people see a shovel purely as a gardening implement, but when metalsculptor Joseph Warren looks at atool, he sees the beginnings of an animal. “A shovel makes a good chest piece,” he says. “A pickaxe can be a spine.”

In 1961, when she was 23, Margaret Thierry moved from her hometown of St. Louis, Mo., to New York City, where she discovered she could be an artist. “While waitressing, I made friends with a bunch of artists,” she says. “They were always talking about art, so I started going to museums to see what the big deal was and to be able to contribute to conversations. After a year, I was hooked on art.”

After graduating from college, most people try to find a job in their field. Furnituremaker Philip Culbertson took a different route. “I got a degree in behavioral zoology at the University of Michigan in the 1970s,” he says, “but I was tired of using my brain, so I got a job in a cabinet shop outside Washington, D.C., and I stayed there for six years.”

A childhood dream of becoming an animator led painter Marcus Gannuscio to become interested in learning to draw the human form. “When I was 12, I saw ‘The Lion King’ and decided I wanted to be an animator,” he says. “My mother actually contacted someone at Disney to find out what I’d need to do to become one, and the person’s advice was to concentrate on learning to draw figures and anatomy.”