Sometimes the impulse to draw springs from a mind’s-eye full-blown vision, with all the conceptual exploring already done. Other times there is a vague notion, of a character or a setting or a quotation, perhaps, and some exploration occurs while drawing. Yet other times the artist just grabs something to draw with and thinks, “I FEEL like drawing, but I have no idea. So let’s just see what happens.”

I have only a slight, tickly notion of what I was thinking when I made the original drawing, which likely happened at least eight years ago. I think I was imagining the taking of an oath of office in a future where doing such would be much more reflective of the person elected, and not straitjacketed by hand-on-Bible or other arcana.

Some day I’ll take a drawing as incompletely formed as this one was, make a hundred copies, and finish them a hundred ways, each as radically different from all the others as reality, including my imagination, allows. It will be an odd hat-tip to Andy Warhol, for reasons obvious and not.