I have just returned from 2 weeks of intense art making at Arrowmont, in Tennessee. One of the suggestions of our instructor, Andrew Saftel, was to go over old sketchbooks and incorporate some of the personal symbolism that may be in them. Of course, to go into those old sketchbooks is to delve into the past! Sketches and clippings of friends, travel writings, totally wacked out oil pastel drawings. And dreams. Lots of accounts of my dreams. Almost more than the drawings they reflect the state of my life at the time. Many were of my mother who died in 1996. One dream was of an old decrepit chair that had been left in a garage, ready for disposal. It was a cheap imitation of a more expensive piece of furniture that my mother had always wanted. Maybe that's what I thought of my mother's life- full of disappointments and compromises. Had life indeed dealt her the bad hand she believed she had at the end of her life? Or maybe this is just my interpretation. Maybe we never really know what our parents wanted. And maybe that is their secret to keep.

In these sketchbooks were many pictures of Jamie. Also some sketches that he actually did. Here is a sketch I did of him-1980.