"This painting was for an article about college admissions-who gets in and who get left behind (race was an issue). The two main characters are white and the silhouette represents the one who gets left out. I didn't want to show this character as any one race, so I left it as a silhouette which gives the image a haunting feeling as the first impression is of a happy scene. This drawing represents a change in direction for me, coming from my personal work-but I wanted to use this style for this piece. I wanted to show the figures in somewhat of a time warp, as this is an ongoing problem, so I gave the landscape a kind of nineteenth/twentieth-century rural America feel, with the silhouette of a boy representing a kind of slavery being segregated from the others by a fence."