The Left Lane
Electric images

In making the monotypes, Cox applies etching ink to thin aluminum plates using a wide variety of tools, including sponges, cotton balls and swabs, lamb's wool, wood and rubber tools, brushes and pieces of cloth. Using an etching press, she then transfers the images to paper. In the electric energy of their lines, the resulting images, with subtle shadings and smudgy lines, border on abstraction.

Cox, who was raised here and has a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Hawai'i, works in the registrar's office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Martin Sheen

Actor Martin Sheen is appearing on movie screens here throughout October, but his latest project isn't a Hollywood drama or even a TV show. It's an action-adventure clip that's a pitch to save one of America's greatest wilderness treasures, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The trailer, produced by filmmaker Benjamin Arsequel of PublicServiceMedia.org in San Francisco and paid for by a consortium of environmental groups, displays footage of the wilderness and animals in the Refuge's fragile coastal plain. Sheen tells viewers: "The Arctic Refuge. Is this worth destroying, forever, for six months of oil? This is Martin Sheen. Log on to alaskawild.org. Together, we can save what's left." Oil companies are lobbying Congress for permission to drill for oil and gas in the Refuge.

Actors Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and musicians such as Alanis Morisette, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Moby, the Beastie Boys, Matchbox 20, the Dave Matthews Band and the Barenaked Ladies, have all come out against the energy plan and its provision to develop the last 5 percent of Alaska's Arctic coastal lands that remain off-limits to oil exploration.