Good question. I grew up in mid-century, mid-America, so that is the world I know. But there was an immense, all-pervading charm that sustained we who lived at that time. That charm no longer exists in North America. We have all become so sophisticated that very few folksy characters remain to amuse, delight, charm and energize us. I feel the architecture, cars, clothing and appliances of that time carried the same charm as the people. I feel North America was much happier then, and I wish we could return to a simpler time when our spirits were sustained by more humanity and less materialism. So in my effort to encourage that dream, I illustrated the children in an earlier North American setting.

When considering scenes from my childhood for illustrations in a potential book, I remembered a time when I was alone in the world in a cow pasture some distance from my house. I was playing with my cars, trucks and steam shovels in a sand pile left from construction debris. I was about 6 years old. As I reminisced over that scene and my deep feeling of contentment (even though I was all alone I was not lonely), I thought what that scene might look like to god if there is a god. I wondered how he might feel about it. I imagined that god must have vicariously delighted immensely in my contentment and amusement as I played. No one else in creation would have known exactly what I was doing at that moment but an omniscient being. I carried the thought further and imagined that god must really get huge pleasure out of the play of all children and child-like folks. This was one part of how I got the idea of god's invisible hands surrounding us and watching out for us in our daily adventures.

At that same time when I was preparing ideas for a children's book, I was going through many rough problems in my life (as is always the case). Three different people from different parts of the world, who did not know each other, each contacted me in a period of about a month. Each had received a dream and a voice in the dream had told them to tell me not to worry because I was in god's hands. The coincidence of this odd experience was not lost to me. So, again, I had the idea of depicting god's hands holding us as we go about our days.

The idea of god's hands holding us in whatever we are doing is my way of saying that we can have a nice adventure every day if we remember we are in the safety of god's care. We might not be able to go where we want; we might not be able to afford the dream house we want to buy; we might not be able to have the relationship we crave. But we can have a nice adventure; enjoy nature and the company of friends and pets and even a nice picnic lunch in whatever situation in which we find ourselves.

My family (I am the oldest of 7 children) moved into a larger, older farmhouse that was the last house a mile from downtown and bordered by cow pastures and farmland. This was the summer before I began first grade. We children had immense fun exploring that huge, old farmhouse; its attics; its out buildings; the nearby gas stations with snack food for sale; and the neighbor children.

In the first week my sisters and I found an opening in the back of a large closet upstairs that led to an attic. In that attic we found treasures that children from an earlier family in that house has hidden. The toys seemed to be from a much earlier decade and this was a tremendously exciting find for us. We imagined that was probably their secret meeting place. My sisters grabbed the antique dolls. I found a big, big, big, old hardbound book of fables with many colored illustrations. The cover was hardbound and highly embellished. All the stories were about animals in the forest that spoke and wore human clothes and had houses in the tree stumps or underground. I was just learning to read, but that book kept me enthralled for many months. One of the hundreds of stories collected within that book was the well-known book: WIND IN THE WILLOWS. Going on adventures with all those animals was unbelievable fun for my young imagination. That was my favorite book ever. But it got lost somehow. I would love to somehow find it someday. I think it was with that book that I got my first notion that I would like to be involved with creating children's fantasy books with positive feelings.

As a child I strove to draw and paint very realistically. It was a challenge for me. I first learnt by copying paintings of Jesus and his apostles from the family bible. I laid on the cool, hardwood, living room floor when I was supposed to be having rest time on hot summer afternoons and spent hours copying those paintings. But as a teenager I fell in love with impressionist art because I got bored with clumsy, laborious human attempts to imitate photography in painting, and I began to want to express feelings instead of merely depicting scenes. So I experimented with impressionism. Then traditional Chinese and Japanese art got my attention in college because of its clean and elegant stylistic appearance. But in recent years I've been drawn back to a more realistic style, but of fanciful subject matters. I like the way this allows the mind to drift and imagine the subject matter.

For Mani Irani's book DREAMING OF THE BELOVED, which depicts her dreams, I evolved a style including monochromatic margin art with images that reflect upon the subject matter in the main, multi-colored area of the illustration. Two things lent themselves to the creation of this style. For one thing, Mani wanted to have full-bleed, wide, panoramic scenes to illustrate her wide-open dream landscapes. The monochromatic art in the margin areas of the illustrations was a way to invite the viewer to continue imagining, day-dreaming and meditating on the main theme of the illustration and story. Also, at the time I illustrated Mani's book, I was discovering Persian and Indian miniatures. By tradition, miniatures were painted on cloth that was bound in books to be taken with the traveling tribes in their tents. The Persian miniatures had monochromatic margin areas with patterns of art reflecting the main, full-colored area of the paintings, and the words of the stories were beautifully hand scribed into text block areas in elegant Persian. The effect of the decorative margin art lets the viewer continue to imagine and daydream about the main story of the illustration. In my mind I began to imagine that maybe I had done some of those Persian miniatures in a previous lifetime. I even got the idea maybe I was a court artist in Agra during the time of Shivaji (a minor avataric incarnation). So since Mani was of Persian heritage and her book was of dreams, it seemed to need a style of art that would allow the viewer to continue the dream in his imagination. I fell in love with this look. It is not common so it is rather unique for me, and I used this technique in JUST IMAGINE.