I’ve been thinking the last week or two about what to work on next now that the show is over. This is a common reaction by artists after a big push to get ready for the event. In March, I posted about dropping by the Funk and Schuster Printmaking studio and being excited about the prospect of doing some mono-prints. I had just seen a show of small black on white woodcuts in London I found interesting, but the process was too foreign to me. It was only recently that I realized that what I needed to do was some drawing. Drawing was my primary process in college. I did massive ones mounted on canvas and presented them as paintings. There were several professors who indulged and others who dismissed me as a frivolous female. I did take Printmaking as part of my BFA but, really all I wanted to do was draw, which I continued to do throughout my twenties before I finally picked up a brush. Even now while painting the birds, that first drawing stage is often almost too good to cover up, but I do. Saturday, I pulled out an old portfolio from storage. I’ve got more professional pieces from the 80s tucked away in my studio but this was work I hadn’t looked at since I left NYC fifteen years ago. Expecting trash, I was surprised. Most of it is falling apart if not badly faded, but some of it is very strong. The drawing above is part of a panoramic series I did from the roof of the tenement building where I lived in Soho. It led to the brush because I also did sketches of clouds from the roof that became a series which also resembled maps and ribbon agates, and I spent years deep into the theory that agates, maps and clouds, were all the same thing.