If I get lazy while watching a subtitled movie and try to lie down, I muddle up the characters and miss the twist. If I try to translate my friend Fabian while he chats to his brother in Spanish tongue-rolls, I fail clumsily. But when I stumbled onto to marialamar's delicate doodlings, the language she spoke was irrelevant. I got it anyway.

Lately I've been attracted to illustration with an abstract twist - patterns and shapes that I can get lost in. It's amazing what we can say with just a few shapes. Sometimes it's more than we can with an over-share of lines. Maybe once the story becomes too obvious, the viewer isn't so much a part of it anymore.

Like my friend Fabian, Maria speaks Spanish. Even though I can't read her captions, I can imagine her graylead gently scraping the white paper as she hunches over her desk. I can translate her lines much better than I can translate her words.

OK, now I'll let you go do some flickr meditation over at marialamar's beauitful flickr stream.

Adios!