Late Bloomer

I've always been a late bloomer. I'm just a little slow. So I'm a day late with my September 11 piece. Well, not my piece that was done for that date, but my piece for 9/11. This drawing is done on a watercolor crinkle background, and it has 3,016 dots. I included the hijackers and the 24 people still listed as missing. The light blue dots represent the people on flights, the light purple represent the missing, the deep red-brown dots represent the hijackers, and the green dots represent the pentagon casualties. The rest are obviously those in the towers.

It's so shocking. So shocking that at some point while doing this I completely lost feeling. At some point it hit a number that I couldn't comprehend any longer. It became unreal. If you take each dot and think of the mourning family and friends, suddenly the page becomes saturated, dripping with ink.

I felt like the pentagon got lost in my picture, with is something I felt during the coverage of the event, so I guess it's appropriate, although accidental.

So, I got an idea out. I tried something I wanted to try- to comprehend the numbers through art. But in the process of dealing with the numbers, I think I lost the artistic sensibility. I don't like the colors. I think had I made better choices in color, it would have been a more emotional piece. It feels a bit pedestrian, and completely unworthy of the enormity of the event and emotion. Perhaps another time, another medium, another support.