During those minutes between the first and second collapse, it seemed oddly silent, although there was a constant shriek of sirens and the sky was full of throbbing helicopters, none of the people watching spoke. Neither did the workers, many of them now covered in the famous grey dirt, as they finally began to hurry passed us like water through rocks in a stream. Someone said the second building was tilting, but I was at the wrong angle to see it. What I saw was it begin to pancake, its spiky antenna hovering in the air as the floors crashed around it and then a big hideous cloud rolling down and out and then up. Eventually the antenna spike fell, and I realized I was weeping while others around me screamed. A very different visual, down at street level, as the sky filled with smoke, to what I would later watch, over and over, on my TV.

When I reached the store, West Broadway was full of people. Watchers, like me, and the workers who'd left against the directions they'd been given. You can walk from there to Soho in 20 minutes, 15 if you hurry. Most of them were not in a rush, it was more like a trance, as they ignored what was going on behind them. The rest of us were riveted. 

I stood in the doorway and yelled at my boss, who was yelling on the phone with the owner who was at home and refusing to turn on her television. The first building fell. It did a weird twisting motion before it came down, I couldn't get my head around what I was looking at. And then it was just gone, in a huge puff of smoke, and all bets were off.

When the first plane flew over my house, I was writing in my journal with a parrot on my shoulder, the sound was so formidable I didn't understand what I was hearing. I heard the impact, 3/4's of a mile away, and I thought two trucks had crashed on Houston Street, half a block from me. People were screaming and I looked out the window to see a crowd already gathered who were pointing south. My radio said something about a plane crash, I turned on the TV but there was no reception, so I threw on some clothes and went outside to see the first building on fire. I went back upstairs and quickly got ready for work, which was around the corner on West Broadway. By the time I was back outside, the second building was also on fire, a term, on fire, which does not begin to cover what it looked like. It was obvious from where I stood, that the top half of the second building would fall down.

I suppose it's time to stop tap dancing around 9/11. But before we dive in, I want to introduce you to the medium I was most involved with until I picked up the brush again on the first anniversary. I'd done collage for many years, as far back as college, when I hit a snag with my painting. The one above is not 9/11 related but it does include two of the three major elements. A figure, usually an angel, and an astronomy image. These were cut and pasted by hand, I like the mess and the involvement. So, be forewarned, tomorrow I'll be taking you down to Ground Zero.

Gollum, perhaps the most alarming of the post 9/11 pulp paintings, was almost a failure because the head did not bind to the background during pressing, so I had to take scissors to it. Although he is not as pretty as the rest of the series, he evokes that event, for me, more than the others do. It was gorgeous morning, it had rained the night before so the sky was intensely blue. And then there was the sulfur grey, not quite yellow, thundercloud of smoke shot with red from the raging fire. His face, agape and googly eyed, much like my face was that morning, says it all.

Sunshine and Pebbles, two more of the paper pulp paintings made the same day as Bojangles. Also done with the same stencil, obviously, they have very organic formats, the black background is not part of these pieces. It's an interesting process, you create the base sheet by dipping a screen into a vat of oatmeal-like pulp and shaking it out to fill the deckle frame to get a clean edge, which I choose not to use; I love the ragged borders. The other colors are applied with nozzled bottles filled with pigmented pulp, and then the water is pressed out, which binds the pulp into a single sheet of paper. It's extremely messy, and so appealing; there must be a way to do it at home, but I haven't figured it out yet.

This is Bojangles, I won an award for this piece as well. Money, in fact, a nice fat check, which is always exciting. It's a handmade paper pulp painting made with stencils and screens. There is a series of these, like the masks, you'll see a number of them; they were all done a few months after 9/11 when I couldn't bring myself to pick up a brush because I was too traumatized. I'd just finished one of the bright yellow angels on September 9th, and the next painting, started the following week and a grey figure edged in red against deep blue, was simply too reminiscent of what I saw from the street outside my house that horrible morning.