...and then the boys play war
9 1/2 " x 9 3/4 "
Monotype, 2002

Seeing children playing at war on an Olympia street, I remembered my own elementary school in the Bronx where in the third grade boys used pencils on paper to develop elaborate drawings of war games. Drawing lines across columns of planes and battleships, they knocked each other out, laughing and arguing the whole time and shouting, "I got you, you're dead!" "Of course, they don't know what death is really, " a mother said, "but it keeps them busy."

I borrowed the phrase, "The Terror of the Situation" from Gurdjieff's All and Everything Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. He discusses many things that are terrifying about human kind and refers specifically to our process of what he calls "reciprocal destruction." Images from the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq haunted me and I found that my response to the aggressive actions of my country were best described by drawing.