I was working on this piece in a painting class when my teacher, who arrived late, brought in a radio and that's how I learned that planes were crashing into the Pentagon & World Trade Center. It was 9/11. I stopped working on this piece as I was afraid of ruining it, and began another piece, less careful and more visceral, slapping boards covered in blue paint down on the canvas and adding shocks of red. Eventually I came back to this piece; the soft pastels of before are layered with the red tendrils of after. Nothing was quite so perfect anymore.