A Brief History

I think it was some time in 1980. The drive was not all that long: a meandering “straight shot” from Tucson to San Diego, especially for a guy in his early thirties, alone, trying to recover from the shock of an unexpected and unwanted divorce, going to visit friends for a few days. But as was the case on all long road trips in those years and my college years before, my mind wandered from inner turmoil to the skies and the clouds gathered there, slowly changing shape, appearing and then disappearing just as swiftly. I was there, somewhere along I-10, some time near mid-day, that I began to see somehow recognizable yet phantom shapes in all that range of puffy whiteness. Dragons, I must have thought. There may be dragons there--barely seen and ignored by most, but there nevertheless.

That was the beginning of my Field Guide to Dragons. My creative mind with nothing better to do had begun to devise an entire panoply of secretive animals and consider the possibilities. Thought Draco Nimbus was undoubtedly the initial inspiration, Draco Domesticus was the first that I finally sat down to describe, and over the next very few years, well over a dozen were thus catalogued. I recall finishing most of the descriptions while sitting at the dining table in the Tucson apartment of the woman who was to become the love of my life: Mary Wyant. Her apartment was in Redondo Towers, down town, the furnishings eclectic and exquisitely tasteful, and the walls a rich chocolate brown. While Mary was teaching at the University of Arizona, I would sit at an old, sturdy, round table on an Eames chair and write. Those particular pieces of furniture became a fundamental part of our life together, a life spanning three decades, lots of travel, and many homes.

The first illustration (Draco Domesticus) was begun, probably in pencil, around 1984, but only one or two others followed, Draco Murmurare being the most certain. It was produced on a Mac computer with an old application called Pixel Paint, a bitmap paint program--the same one I used to illustrate my children’s book “The Mirror.”

But it took nearly thirty more years for the rest of the described dragons to find their faces as illustrations, and that was only because of a promise I made to a woman living in the Guatemalan highlands on the shore of Lake Atitlan. The promise was made, the time was ripe, and all the remaining illustrations were finished in late August and Early September of 2010, some created initially in pencil and then scanned to computer files to be enhanced and given their final character therein, and some created, as was Draco Murmurare, directly on the computer using combinations of input tools, but mostly just drawn, colored, and massaged by mouse and a range of paint applications including Painter©, Photoshop CS3© and custom Photoshop filters.

Completion of this unbound volume (which was the concept from those long-ago beginnings to what you hold in your hands today) of twenty-four dragon images seems, somehow, a fitting capstone to the past thirty years of my creative career, which has included thousands of paintings, several unique homes, lithographs, websites, and books, including “The Mirror” and “Living With and Impostor--a Confluence of Art, Depression, and Dementia.”

Capstone to a successful career as an artist or not, it is what it is, and I am pleased to have finally completed the book. It needed to be done, and now it has.

Enjoy.