 When she finished high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, she took art classes at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate with abstract expressionist painter Henry Bonli and then left home to attend the Alberta College of Art in Calgary for the 1963–64 school year.Here she felt disillusioned about the high priority given to technical skill over free-class creativity, and felt out of step with the trend toward pure abstraction and the tendency to move into commercial art.After a year, at age 20, she dropped out of school, a decision that much displeased her parents, who could remember the Great Depression and valued education highly.