"You know, I wasn't always an artist. In fact, I was a journeyman bookkeeper when I almost kicked the bucket back about twelve years ago. Thankfully I didn't, and when I woke up in the hospital I told everyone I knew that the bookkeeper was dead after all - but in his place was a man who was going to become a successful artist. They thought I was nuts. I wasn't. Two years later, in June 1986, I started the Coyote Series. I was living in Jackson Michigan, a town perennially voted the worst place to live in America. My inspiration was a Joni Mitchell song "Coyote". A friend of mine put it on a tape and I listened. At the time I was 26, a dirt poor billboard painter living in a tiny one room apartment. I was so poor, in fact, that I couldn't even afford a shower curtain to serve as a wedding present for two good friends who were getting married in the Southwest. I figured they might like one of my Coyote drawings so I did a romantic one and took it there - the people at the wedding went nuts! Well, you know how these things go - somebody knew somebody who knew somebody in the art business, and within a year my art was being sold in over a hundred art galleries across the country."