I had my last art class today. We had several student presentations. One girl picked hands as her topic. As she spoke I realized how much we convey through our hands. Some of the things she mentioned were really interesting. For example, how come we put our hand in our mouth when we're sad? We tend to inadvertently use our hands to symbolize our emotions. Think of when you're happy or sad or mad or excited. I remember when I took a public speaking class. The hardest part was to figure out what to do with my hands.

We had another presentation about cultures influencing each other. For example, he mentioned how Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was painted over when he was influenced by African Art. If you look real closely at the woman on the lower right, you can see clear marks of something that was originally there and then erased to be painted over. The idea that Picasso erased his own work and put a darker complexion on the woman on the left and the masks (very much a tradition in African Art) on the two women on the right is quite fascinating.

One of the other students did her project on nudes. Her final image was Magritte's The Rape. What an amazing painting. Says so much, doesn't it?

Talking about figuring out what to do with my life, my friend Natalia sent me the following quote from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "...we can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come..."

Previously?