She started with mistakes, months of them.
One has a fireball scrawled and almost scraped into the paper. The marks are furious, and underneath them there’s a failed drawing of two hands locked in a pinky swear. Ellen Forney felt good making this. She was also crying. Hands are hard to paint. And these would be blown up to the size of a billboard to make Forney’s first piece of public art. To depict a living hand she could believe in, the hands would have to include as few lines as possible, like a poem that’s all wrong unless it has exactly the right number of syllables…
