I love arrows. I devoured any and all Robin Hood books and movies I could find when I was young (I must have watched the Errol Flynn and Disney fox version hundreds of times), pored over NC Wyeth's illustrations, loved the Black Arrow Disney tv film starring Oliver Reed, wanted to be Legolas shooting orcs, my favorite part of Moebius' "The Airtight Garage" is when Archer shoots down the "Flying Object of Destiny", the list goes on and on. My dad, brother, and I used to go on walks in the woods in Germany and we would pretend to be Robin Hood and Little John, fighting with sticks on downed trees, ambushing evil knights with our bows and arrows. When we would visit my grandparents in the mountains of Tennessee my grandfather would make me a bow from old tobacco sticks, and I would run around the fields, my head in a completely different century. Now, as a collector of Japanese prints, I'm a sucker for anything with arrows, from the single solitary arrow of Yoshitoshi striking the deer to the samurai fighting through a hail of arrows. As I search for my personal voice as an illustrator and artist, I am continually brought back to the child that I was, and the memories of when my imagination was just as real as the real world around me. The child I was in 1985 is the art director of my personal work. And he loves arrows.
