It is quite possible that future generations will ask us what we were doing while our leaders conducted an illegal occupation of Iraq while implementing the practice of torture against detainees. It is important to recognize that their are and have been Americans who have not stood by quietly as events unfolded in the name of ‘war against terror.’

I have recently scanned these negatives from a 2005 NYC rally of over 300,000 civilians who gathered to voice the message: bring the U.S. troops home from Afganistan and Iraq.

An excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek now the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.

…perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer…

Here are some examples of my attempts to draw a figure within a minute, attempts to dash onto paper a man or woman’s potential without much self-

awareness or reservation. I am primarily using line to draw the contour of the form, at the suggestion of Bob Cenedella, though I times my hand wonders back toward old habits by working into the figure.

After my morning class at the Art Students League, I usually walk up to the Met to look at and draw from their collection. When I asked my teacher, Jane Morris Pack from the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts what I should look for as I am going through the galleries of the museum, she responded with the following:

In terms of your wanderings in the Met, I think that you should draw whatever gets your attention and in that way start to accumulate a sketch book of ideas that intrigue you.  They might be things that are technically interesting and they might be things that evoke emotional responses. Most of the time we are not stuck for ways to improve our technique but we are seeking ways to improve our tastes, our refinement of our vision and a way to express our inner self. You can figure out more about yourself by discovering what you are interested in.  When we are young that interest is fairly shallow and often trite but it deepens into something more subtle if we pay attention to what catches us and then try to explore those areas.  You may discover a whole new genre of art which has been thus far unknown to you but which speaks to you like no other.  You won’t know until you’re exposed to it. So without any restrictions I would just wander until something grabbed me.

With this in mind, I have been getting enthusiastically lost in one of the world’s great museums. Here is a bit of what I have found.