But while I was there, there was a guy who was very meticulously building a tiny undersea diorama, just millions of tiny, little corals, and brachial pods, and all of these cools things because they had a pre-Cambrian section that showed what the sea life was like in the different geological epochs.
And, he’d come in and watch when we painted every day, and he kind of stroke his beard, and then he’d leave you. Strange guy. Very serious. We never talked to him because he was always working on his diorama. And at the grand opening of the museum he said, “I’ve seen you here every day. You get here early, you stay late. You’ve painted this whole museum. I do these dioramas all over the world, do you want a job?” And I was a starving freelance artist and I said [claps hands] “Sign me up.”
And he runs a fascinating company out of the Ozarks in Missouri that installs dioramas and displays for natural history museums, all over the world, and he wanted to hire a new mural painter, so I was one of his new mural painters, so I was one of his new mural painters, he had some expert mural painters already working. You know, he started me small, I did a lot of small things, but I’ve got murals that went to Japan, I’ve got murals in Dubai. Most of them are behind the diorama. If you see an undersea diorama with kind of the flickering lights and the different creatures swimming around, chances are it’s that company that built it. They’re not a lot of companies that make scientific underwater dioramas. It was wonderful.
I was there for most of the 2000s. If you’ve seen the Mammoth Display at the Rochester Science Center, that’s my mural, 60 feet long. If you have been to the Illinois State Museum, a whole lot of the line work in there – because we did all of the murals like drafting drawings, line drawings, a lot of those are mine. The Sam Noble museum in Oklahoma has got bunch of mine. They’re just kind of scattered all around, and I never really got to sign any of them because it was a big company effort. But what a fascinating thing to spend all day painting these things, and they had scientists on staff, who would come up and look at your work, and say, “That’s inaccurate.”
I remember painting a tiny fish. It wasn’t even a prehistoric fish, it was just like a freshwater fish, that’s alive today, and they were counting the little lines in the fins, and they said, “Okay, this specimen does not have this many rays in its dorsal fin. You need 88 rays. You’ve got 14 rays. The rays are the little lines that are in the fins.”
So, while working there I got a real respect for making sure you get it right. You can’t just fudge things, you can’t make things up. And it was a lot of fun, it was remarkable to go sit inside dioramas and paint them, I got to travel a lot. Most of them we painted in Missouri and then shipped them out, had them installed, but it was a fascinating job. And I probably would have stayed there for life, but it was right when the big recession hit, and since all of our jobs were state jobs we all got laid-off, and they had to shutter their doors for a while.
I think he’s back up and running, but that kind of lit a fire under me to get back into publishing, otherwise I’d still be there happily painting little wooly mammoths, and stuff.