During one of my exhibits in 2005 I received a message that a children's musician from Minneapolis had looked at my work and really liked a painting titled My Bed is a Boat, inspired by a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. Fast forward to 2009, when I received an email from him saying that he was ready to work on the lullaby album and hadn't gotten the image out of his head of that painting. The size of that painting would not have worked well for a cd format, and I figured it could use a good update anyway, as I have grown a lot as an artist in the last six years. I still wanted to give the mood of serenity and wonder, but I wanted to add a sense of place. In my original painting there are only bare hills in the distance.
In the new version, it's a warm and exotic locale- palm trees, a tropical bird and turtle, and mountains in the distance. As I have said in previous blogs, music has a strong impact on the creation of my work and with this illustration I found myself listening to Stan Getz- that smooth 50s jazz that you'd expect to be playing in some sleepy little club in the wee hours of the morning somewhere in South America. I added two children instead of just one in the beginning simply because it made the composition more dynamic, but it really gave the illustration less of a lonely feeling and became more about two children sharing the wonder of a new, adventurous experience together.
