JH: I had been working primarily in oil until I moved to Warren Street. The loft needed a lot of work, there was no room to set up large canvasses, so I used watercolor in the interim. Although I went back to painting in oils later, the watercolors had become more suitable for my work. I like them because they are portable.

DW: In January 2001, you began your project of painting “A Window a Day.” Why did you choose windows as a subject?

JH: The “Window a Day” project was devised as a discipline, to keep me looking and working. I have always been attracted to windows because they form a natural frame within which to compose. Many of my oils involve windows, too. After September 11 the scaffolding throughout the neighborhood provided “frames” or “windows” from which to capture the constantly changing vistas, but my need to draw was too intense to limit them to one a day.

DW: When did you start to sketch the first images?

JH: On the first of my fleeting returns home to get my checkbook or something, I happened to have paper in my bag, I had to record my first sight of the ruins. The biggest problem was orientation; there was so much scaffolding about, not to mention machinery and various barriers, that the most familiar streets seemed like some other planet. The ruins became familiar, a point of reference, and came to represent, I see now, the complex itself.

I had to stay on the perimeter because Ground Zero was off-limits to all but the workers, the government and the VIPs. I would skirt the ever-changing boundaries and seek what vantage points I could. I fantasized about getting in, but it felt wrong to me, and at some point I saw that I could only record my own experience.

DW: Would your pictures have been different had you gone into Ground Zero?

JH: Yes, I think, very, but I'll never know how.

DW: Did you feel that as a neighborhood resident and affected citizen you had a right to view the destruction at Ground Zero first hand?

DW: You have made a chronological series of sketches that follow the tearing apart and removal of the rubble. There is no doubt that these pictures are beautiful even though they reflect something sinister. What are you trying to communicate?

JH: I was really trying to communicate the reality of it to myself. I was particularly struck by the contrast between the intact buildings surrounding the site, and the destruction within. It had changed every time I went out to draw. I wanted to show that. Rather than denying the dark nature of the events, I saw irony in the awful beauty the ruins presented. At night, there was a ghastly light that was stunning and grim, yet somehow spiritual. I find the pictures haunting, even now. I can hardly believe that I saw what I saw. This is my way of letting you see it, too.

DW: Where were you when the attacks took place?

JH: It was rush hour, so we were accustomed to hearing the traffic helicopters at that hour. I was in the kitchen. My loft is on the top floor. We heard the first plane flying low right overhead, and then a dull thud. I thought a helicopter had crashed, until I looked up and saw the outline of a plane in the side of the north tower. The smoke was curling up all along the sides. A few minutes later we heard the second plane. By then the TV was on. Panes of glass were swirling in the smoke outside the window, and I think we went into shock.

We live very close, and thought the towers would surely fall on us, or a least some of the debris would come crashing through the skylight. We had no way of knowing that they would implode. After we heard the first building go, we grabbed the cats and ran down the stairs to the first floor of the hallway. We accepted the possibility that we were about to die. We were so frightened, it felt almost peaceful.

We heard the second building collapse — it wasn’t that noisy — sort of like waves rushing over rocks at the ocean. It was eerily quiet for a few moments, then the dust came pouring through the cracks under the front door. After that, in our shock, we felt nothing else could happen, and so returned to the loft. It wasn’t until the third building lit up with fire that we realized we must escape. We left everything except the cats and my phone book, and fled.

DW: When did you return?

On Sept. 26, we were allowed to return home. For a while thereafter, we were in the “Red Zone.” fenced in with the site, and had to show identification to bring groceries home. Despite the horror of being there, we experienced great camaraderie. All the neighbors were so happy to see each other again. Once we had returned permanently, I was inexorably drawn to the subject, and began a routine of circling the ruins a couple of times a week, obsessively recording what I could see.

DW: When did you turn your project into a book?

JH: As I drew, snatches of poetry and prose would come to mind. I would take the sketches back to the loft and turn them into watercolors. I sent some to friends and family, just so they would have some idea of what it was like down here.

There are close to 100 pictures in the series, and I chose 65 as the chronological record. I also preface the record with a few images from the “Window a Day” paintings made prior to September 11, to give a stronger sense of how irrevocably things changed. I put the pictures into a scrapbook, with some of the poems, and sent copies out at Christmas. This is a personal experience and an historic record. I want to communicate what I saw for this and later generations.

DW: You have chosen verses by some of the world’s greatest poets to accompany your work — Wordsworth, Poe, Eliot, Dante, to name a few. How did you choose these works?

JH: Mostly, they were bits I knew. Friends sent some to me when they had seen the pictures. The poems were comforting in that they remind us that this is not a new experience in the world — there is a universality of feeling that has existed through the ages. The words give another perspective with which to deal with the act, the ruins, the loss and the sadness.

JH: The most obvious change is in the light, the weirdness of the perspectives, the views no one has ever seen. To everyone in and around New York City, the World Trade Center was a powerful reference. For people who live and work here there are moments when we look up, and are reminded, piercingly, what has happened.