Look, I just wanted to paint a whale in the sky. Other painters have done much more fantastical and impressive combinations of landscapes with sea creatures, but I don’t care. So I painted a killer whale just hanging in the sky, above a field in front of Mt. Harris.
But I also gave it a purple glow, because I figured it was more than just a whale. Probably something in disguise. Maybe something that just happens to look like a whale. I wasn’t prepared to answer those questions yet, so I called this painting Landscape With Nothing to See Here.
Connections:
Landscape was just the third canvas I painted for the library show, and even at the time I realized how disparate the pictures were. They were so unconnected that I was starting to grow concerned. It would still be some time before I figured out how the whale fit in with the rest of them, but it was actually pretty great in the end.
Eventually I brought the characters of Hot Rod and Moon Dog into this series of paintings. Their story is complex and mysterious, filled with unknowns, and it just might be possible that the killer whale in the sky is a space ship. A space ship belonging to Moon Dog! The whale appears in an echo rippling through the multiverse in Hot Rod and Moon Dog: Interdimensional High Five, and floating in the background of Affordable Solutions to Unusual Problems. Its probable nature is made much more explicit in Escape.
