What can you glean from taking a fresh look at an object you made with your hands during an early, formative moment in your life? Could it, like an old song, trigger something that carries you back to another place in time with a sudden renewal of past thoughts and feelings?

I’ve held on to things I made during childhood and as a youth in Massachusetts, including my first fired ceramic, of our pet dog, from children’s classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a painting, now in a tube, from 1973 or 74. I’ve also kept paintings from figure classes taken later at the Museum School where the models would pose for a couple of sessions and be done before any of my paintings could be completed. I recall Henry, my teacher there, coming by my easel, saying: “Norman, I bet you don’t know how to paint a sphere,” which was certainly true as it turned out, and an important lesson.

That was all a bit before the Museum School’s Graham Gund building opened. I’d carry those unfinished canvases out to my Chevy Nova, which I would park around the Fenway, and which always seemed to invite tickets punctuated with a blaze of luminous red on the windshield. I’d drive back over the Mass Avenue bridge to Tufts, where I earned my degrees, getting wet paint in a variety of hues all over the place. (I still get wet paint all over the place.)

The other day I remembered, when I unrolled that very early painting from its tube, how little l knew about technique in oil painting before art school. I recognized that like so many of the later figure paintings, I had never really finished that one either, in part because it measured five feet, nine-and-one-half inches by four feet, five inches (I thought it was even larger, but a tape measure just confirmed otherwise). At the time I was blocking it out, I recalled, part of my motivation was to prove that I was making productive use of the studio that my secondary school had provided me, a former art building that was otherwise vacant. Under the tubes of a fluorescent light, I brushed the image of a man wearing a blue coat and white blouse, smoking a pipe, seated somewhat dreamily at a table with an open book before him. I surrounded him with an elastic ooze of faces and contorted figures stretching to the edges of the picture plane.

I ran out of time, but displayed it in a show at my school anyway. As they passed through the halls, some people wondered not just who was the man represented in the painting or what he may have been smoking, but whether I too had something smoldering in a pipe. Of course, this was the 1970s and some of my classmates were so enthusiastic about the subject that the chatter probably augmented speculation. To the school’s credit, however, no one in the administration questioned me about it.

Adolescence can be a turbulent time, but truth be told, my overwhelming intoxicant had been Vincent Van Gogh, in particular a portrait he painted in Auvers of Dr. Gachet, not long before the artist’s demise, which I had seen reproduced in a book. Another stimulant was Picasso. Maybe an image of Shakespeare was reflected in the face. The scale I chose had something to do with Abstract Expressionism, notably Motherwell and deKooning, of whom I had just become aware through a fellow student, my artistic rival, whose tip would change my outlook.

Some years later, the pipe-smoking man would take pride of place hanging in a bedroom at my mother’s home. This must have been a measure of her love, even though the work would eventually make its way into attic storage. While cleaning out the house after her death in 2013, I slid it into a PVC tube and into a U-Haul truck bound for where we live today. Back into storage it went.

Life gets in the way of the act of painting, but not always without benefit, at least in my case. Working in museums kept me always close to art. While often at the cost of studio time, the reward has been a somewhat broad and continuous immersion that has nurtured at least some creative smolder. I only wonder what more I might have internalized from a wider, more democratic day-to-day exposure to art over time, but that is the subject for another musing.

To make the best use of space at home today, it would be most practical to toss a lot of the old pictures that I’ve kept, but some of them may have earned time equity. In any case, before taking a look at it after so long, I thought I could still describe each detail in that painting of the man with the pipe. It’s surprising what you can draw from a tube. Seeing it afresh, I’m glad this picture remained unfinished. Finishing it may have meant the end of it, but instead it’s ever in process, even rolled back up and tucked into its time capsule again.