"I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what"

A quiet confidence pulses through the line: a certainty about the nature of a life, paired with an openness about its form. “Always knew” suggests a deep, pre-verbal intuition, an identity anchored in making, noticing, and shaping. “Some sort of artist” widens the canvas. It refuses the trap of premature labels and leaves room for painting, music, poetry, performance, illustration, or some hybrid that doesn’t yet have a name. The second half, “but didn’t know what”, turns uncertainty into a companion rather than an obstacle. Not knowing is not a flaw in the vocation; it is the condition that lets discovery happen.

Creative paths are rarely straight. They loop through experiments, false starts, curiosities that turn into obsessions, and skills that migrate from one medium to another. Many artists begin by sensing a temperament, an appetite for rhythm, images, stories, or sound, before they find the vessel that fits. That early, spacious conviction allows the artist to stay faithful to impulse rather than to industry categories. It also pushes back against cultural pressure to specialize too soon, reminding us that vocation can be precise in essence and provisional in expression.

Prelutsky’s own trajectory underscores this truth. The linguistic play, musicality, and performative energy of his children’s poetry echo other arts; you can hear song in the cadence, see illustration in the imagery, feel theater in the timing. He shows how a sensibility finds its medium by following delight. The “what” emerges through doing, by writing, singing, drawing, testing, and discarding, until one form feels like home without exhausting the others.

There is kindness in this stance toward oneself. It legitimizes exploration, protects curiosity, and keeps the door ajar for reinvention. The identity remains constant, maker, player with form, while the toolset evolves. To commit to being “some sort of artist” is to promise steadiness in attention and practice, and to accept that the exact shape of that promise is discovered along the way.