Two days before Easter Sunday, 1935, she began to drawing on a scrap of paper bag she had used for a grocery list. Although she didn't understand the "funny things" she drew, she made another picture the next day. . . .

. . . Minnie seemed so driven that the Evans family feared she was going insane. They worried she would have to go to an asylum. In a fit of frustration, Julius took the drawings away from her. When Minnie couldn't make pictures, though, she got sick.

The images in her mind haunted her. "Those things got on me," she said. "No one knows. If I didn't paint, seem like I would die."