This is why I love painting. It stills the world and condenses experience into a single potent image that allows us to reencounter unexpected emotions and memories we thought were lost. It preserves colors and conventions from another age, a time when the world was an endless source of mystery and beauty and wonderment. The art we see as children stays with us. It is, for many of us, the first intimation of a world beyond our backyard. My mother read a lot of Richard Scarry to me—way more than she did Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak or any of the other popular picture book artists of the early 70s. Strangely it was Scarry’s earlier work from the 1960s that resonated with me the most-especially this image from his I Am A Bunny (1963). This is something I can’t explain. Why would a five-year-old boy prefer one style to another? Maybe there’s an inherent fascination with the world that existed just before we did--a world that lingers around us like a palimpsest, coloring the way we see our own moment in time. Whatever the reason, these more painterly works by Scarry made much more of an impact on me than his increasingly graphic, line-centered work popular during my childhood.

Working on my graphic novel gives me the chance to work through the major themes of my creative life: history, memory, ruins, lost worlds, and most especially...deep time.

She's originally from the palace of Nineveh, the citadel of the last great king of the Assyrians, Ashurbanipal. Around the years 645-635 BCE, a master sculptor created a series of reliefs for the king that depicted him "hunting" lions. I put hunting in quotations because it is more like ritualized slaughter, akin to bullfighting. The animals naturally don't stand a chance of escape. Far from a hunt in the wild, the massacre begins with dozens of animals brought to the killing area in cages.

For the past several years I've spent most of my creative energies on a project I call Deep Time.