I'm writing this by hand in a hotel room in Kerala, recovering from H1N1, watching gnats crawl across the page. A month ago I left my studio in Versailles, Kentucky mid-series—nine large canvases of the Anatomia Inversa, my many-armed self-portraits built on Renaissance anatomical underpinnings. Now, fevered and far from home, I'm asking a different question: do those charcoal lines and bone-like brushstrokes reach toward something more universal than the Western tradition that taught me to make them?