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              ONCE CALLED SILVERPOINT The humble pencil - everybody on every continent uses it - for everything mundane, from writing a grocery list to working out a math problem to solving a crossword puzzle, to doodling idly on a piece of scrap paper while chatting on the phone. But this simple tool holds a much more elegant and powerful use - creating museum quality art. Amazing - a slender piece of wood with a round graphite stick in the middle - can, in the proficient hand, create masterpieces that cause hearts to flutter. Jan van Eyck way back in the late 14th century, Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer, da Vinci, Holbein, and many, many others sketched with it, not for use as an end in itself, but as a prelude to a painting or etching. Before the 17th century this glorious medium was called  silverpoint , and the stylus was made of silver or some other hard metal drawn on specially treated paper. There was no variation of strength in the line and no erasing; one error and you'd ha
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  MY CHILLING EXPERIENCE AS AN OFFICE WORKER In many ways I've been lucky regarding my work experience. For 50 years I was a free-lance graphic designer, illustrator and portrait artist with my own business. It was a sole proprietorship and I worked alone. I wore all of the necessary hats to handle a small business, and wore them well. To sum it up, I was my own boss in my own studio; and thus, insulated from the precarious ride on the roiling cataracts of the workplace. That was about to change. I had weathered 911, The Great Recession, and Covid; but immediately after Putin's Invasion clients melted away and my business shut down. Well, I still had bills to pay, and food to put on the table. I was 75 and knew that, despite the fact that laws in America discourage age discrimination, there's a wink and a nudge regarding those rules; so I turned to an organization within the Texas Workforce that trains and places seniors. It took about three months waiting, and in the summe