As an artist, Mark Balma is up to big things, but that’s also how he got started, after all: on large pieces of paper from the religious sisters who taught him at Ascension Catholic School in Minneapolis. They knew the grade-schooler had a talent for art, so sometimes they’d ask him to create something for special occasions, like St. Joseph’s feast day.

For him, the chance to do large-scale drawing was a real treat. “In those days, there were no places to get big pieces of paper” outside his classroom, he said. Once he got a commission from the sisters, “I’d go home and I’d probably work on it over the weekend … and that got me thinking big scale.”