Ink and watercolor on Moleskine Japanese album sketchbook, 8 x 127 1/2in

Like most two-year-olds I was drawing with pencil on paper on the floor of my Dad’s basement studio on South 16th Street in Bismarck, North Dakota before I could talk. And then I learned to talk. And then I didn’t stop (drawing).

One time I was cut off in a crosswalk on Geary Street in San Francisco by a naked skateboarder on their Monday morning commute.

Several years ago, while on my way to Guitar Center in Manhattan to find a ukulele for my Dad’s birthday, I passed a Duchampian figure descending 14th Street wearing yellow shag-carpet kitten heels.

These things happen.

At the then newly-remodeled George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal passengers were cueing up for points New Jersey in the high summer heat, pizza slices and fountain sodas, headed for the Shore. Crammed in between a Hasidic man and a guy halfway through a Happy Meal, a Joe Pesci figure indicated with his middle finger that he wasn’t in the mood to be drawn on that hot August afternoon all those years ago. And that was Ok.

We were all young once.

This Brave New World we find ourselves in would be hard to explain to our younger selves.

Just ask Degas’s dance studio chaperone, or Daumier’s Dandy frozen in bronze.

Once from imagination I drew a girl in a blue dress with periwinkle ink before checking out of a hotel room in Philadelphia. Later, I drew a Picasso self portrait from 1906 at the museum of art there in Philly, where Rocky skipped steps on an early morning run. And then later, Picasso again (for a time it would seem that Picasso had everything figured out).

Security guards discourage drawing with periwinkle ink while standing in front of Titian’s monumental paintings for Spain’s King Philip II at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston (Instagram personalities and bathtub rubber duckies are far less discriminatory).

I’ve seen Raphael’s BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE (c. 1514) in the Louvre in Paris and I’ve stood alongside Raphael’s grave-place in the Pantheon in Rome. In my dream-drawing I’ve reimagined Raphael’s BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE as Willie Beck from my novel THE BADLANDS SALOON (c.2009), tank-topped and lawn-chaired, in the presence of church music.

And meanwhile we carry on, in spite of it all, floating. Perhaps nothing’s really changed.