Liberty with her hand on her heart, which is not how she is usually drawn. This is oil at twenty-four by thirty-six inches, the figure in green against the red and white of the flag, and beside her a hand-lettered panel in the manner of a comic balloon saying that America needs love. I built her the slow way, a graphite drawing first, then a raw umber block-in, then the green, then the crown, and the stripes and the lettering last of all. Pop art gave me the flat colour and the speech balloon. The rest is a wish, said plainly, at a size that makes it hard to walk past.