What do I look for in these beautiful works? What allows them to fall loosely under the rubric of "Art Meets Word"? For some of these pieces I was struck by the stories that were unfolding there within the frame. I can allow my imagination to form both the origins of the story and the imminent outcomes. I feel that the artist has captured a climactic moment; she/he has frozen the action at the most crucial time. These works also tend to include symbols within the landscape, i.e., forms, objects, structures that symbolize complex psychological effects or include echoes of universal messages. As with poetry and fiction, these works employ symbols and symbolism to allow the presented scenes and characters to resonate and become multi-dimensional. Art that contains text often confronts language, exposes its obscurities, double meanings and misnomers. It seeks to expand language and undermine it. Burroughs said it best when he wrote "language is a virus". In my own work I am interested in freezing spontaneity. The words naturally arrive as I'm creating the tines of a spiral. They are then transferred to the paper in the form of block letters. They are just random thoughts set down without censor or edit. They are mentally vomited onto the page. This is another way that art can meet word, simply by adding text to the paint palette. And when I am experiencing the exhibition I am also drawn to how these artists create character in their works. Just as a novelist creates and brings various characters together and then stirs them together in the broth of the story, these artists are evoking characters in the pieces. This anthropomorphism and/or personal history accentuates the drama unfolding. We are able to recognize these characters and/or the traits they seem to display.