Strange Portents

I have a sketchbook.

You’re supposed to have a sketchbook when you’re an artist;  the story is, you carry it around with you, and you use it to draw what you see around you, or whatever pops into your head, so that later on you can take those fragmentary pieces of art and use them in larger compositions, forge them together into some kind of overwhelming masterpiece.  I think.  It strikes me as the sort of thing that probably got its start back in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance, when “art” meant oil paintings, and you couldn’t just stand there with the brush and knock out The School of Athens, you had to put some thought into the cartoon first.  (Yes, that’s where the word “cartoon” came from.)  I rarely draw in mine.  I suck at life drawing, and usually only resort to it if I’m god-awfully bored or disinterested in participating in my social surroundings.  I fill the few pages I do with geometric symbols instead, or conceptual sketches concerning ideas I’m hashing through, iconographies.

Still, once in a while, something appears while I’m not paying attention that makes me tilt my head sidewise and pay attention again.  And today, on the bus, it was this:

Angels I have drawn aplenty over the years, but I have never seen her like before.  I can only wonder what she portends.

I have a pretty good idea why her face is hidden, though.  And I’m all but positive I had a taste of those fists once upon a time…