All the clowns are laughing themselves to death tonight.

My favorite art program Artrage, has a nifty feature. You can overlay a tracing image (with variable opacity) and the brush will automatically pick your colors from the image. As soon as you touch the canvas, the color wheel grabs from that spot. You can turn the tracing image all the way down and dab around the canvas and an image will start to emerge.

I often use stills from movies, and the learning you find in this is wonderful. After a while you think only about concepts like value and composition and color theory and instead of making and image, you discover the image. You can follow colors and shadows and shapes like veins of ore, and find what a good image is comprised of.

This is probably a dumb thing to derail your day with, but I'm having a hard time getting over Robin Williams. I wasn't his biggest fan by any stretch, and I didn't think of him often.

But I realize that when I did think of him, he took up a very important bit of real estate in my mind. He could do anything, his roles had equal parts comedy and pathos, and he did it so well that I knew it came from deep down for him. He could go dark and still find the balance. He could smile and laugh at his own folly.

In a way, I guess that I thought he had figured it all out. He figured out how to be successful in this world and inside himself, by being a vessel for the universal expression. In that way, he was a beacon to me and a symbol for my own potential, if I have any.

Boy was I wrong.

And I realize now that famous people get way more hung on them than their money ever deserves. Those poor coat-racks learn a parlor trick, and we assume they're real magicians. Maybe that's the kind of pressure that cracked him.

Or maybe it's not even him that I can't get over. Maybe instead it's the method, the depression and the suicide that won't let me go.

The Fisher King is about coping with loss. It's about taking something for granted and having it torn away by a senseless act of violence. It's about what you do in the aftermath. How you confront the fear and figure out how to be okay inside your own skin.

Click any of these images to see them in detail. That program really makes some lovely moves.

And apologies for sending another newsletter so soon after the last one. These were done, and I wanted to get them out. Thanks for listening.