I asked a dear friend while I worked on the project, "In a piece of art, would you rather choose cleverness or sincerity?" She didn't think twice: "Sincerity." Her choice validated the choices and sacrifices I'd made, and all the choices/sacrifices I would make before the project was finished.

I could have leveraged history and popular culture to make my drawings ironic. But Ligeti once said, "I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape." It would have been fashionably cruel to make wry sport of his earnest work. I might care for fashion, but certainly not for cruelty.

So--voice-leading lead-ropes converging, multiplying, and splicing back together. An em dash responds to the exclamation mark on the previous panel. The narrative continues below, an undercurrent.

Panel 7: the green/pink symbols become monograms. Meanwhile, the seeds settle.

Panel 8: punctuated symbols, as the electric roots intensify the action

Panel 9/13: climax. Big blue pine from blue seeds, purple cactus creature, brown cattails, and those little curly reddies. Overhead swirls a benevolent streak of green/pink.

Panel 10: A dry spell. The green/pink swirl flattens, then flatlines. The (active) narrative doesn't address this "coda".

Silence until--the rain begins.