I painted this work for a show called Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, the idea was that, in the W. waning years right before Obama, we were in desperate need for Good Leaders, who were like an Endangered Species, in a world that was like a Ship at Sea. I felt optimistically that no matter what your political denomination, hopefully you love animals, and especially those that are endangered, like this tiger. Tigers need a lot of space to roam, and that is diminishing drastically, there are only a little over 3,000 living in the wild today, so sad.

Tigers are so sleek and beautiful, and even though in fiction like The Jungle Book, tigers can be portrayed as malevolent, I think they are anything but—they are heroes. Feminine mystique, like my love for all cats, there is something about a tiger that is so seductive and withholding, yet powerful and a force. Here, between blades of grass, she seems to be pensively looking, camouflaged, into what I hope breaks into a kind of surreal pick-it-stick surreality of a dream world, like angels protecting one of the great queens of the planet.