If there’s one thing you should know about me it’s that I love frogs. Frogs are just the best. Do you know why we think frogs say “ribbit?” Most frogs make some sort of a croaking noise, or if you’re on the east coast you might hear “peepers.” But there’s one type of frog in the entire world that says “ribbit” and it happens to live right around Hollywood. So every time movies are filmed in California with frogs in the background, that’s the sound they make.
I knew I had to draw a frog, and of course frogs like to live in ponds. That got me thinking of Monet’s classic series of water lily paintings – which was the inspiration for the bridge. There’s a really fantastic sculpture garden in New Jersey called Grounds for Sculpture where artists have recreated many famous paintings in three dimensions. They built the bridge from Monet’s paintings and grew water lilies in the river below, and I got to walk through this real life painting and be fully immersed in it. They captured the sense of calm and beauty perfectly.
Where I grew up in rural Virginia we had thousands of fireflies in our yard around sunset in the summers. They loved to fly around the hazelnut bush in our back yard. As kids we used to catch them in jars with holes poked in the lid and try to make little homes for them with sticks and moss. They’re little flickers of childhood magic to me.
Finally, I had to add a few koi to the magical pond. We used to go to a buffet when I was a kid on rare occasions for dinner and somehow they maintained an actual koi pond running through the building with a little bridge over it leading to the dining tables. Between plates we would run over to the little artificial river and stare at the fish as they swam back and forth, bright colors shimmering against the dark water. I used to imagine that someday I would buy a house and have my own koi pond in the back yard, and I would give them a lot of space so they could grow to be gigantic.
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