THE DEEP WALKERS
date - July 2003
medium – ink
size - 11” x 17”
surface - Académie Heavyweight Sketch Paper

THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE : Sometimes an artist sits down with no idea of what they are going to do, they just know they are going to do something. Maybe their subconscious has some clue as to what is about to transpire and it just hasn’t had the time to tell the rest of the artist what that idea is, and maybe it doesn’t. The pencil hits the paper and suddenly an image starts to form on the paper while the mind is simply blank and just running on autopilot. By the time the ink comes out and the pen starts to make things permanent, the artist is still wondering what they are doing.

And when it’s done the likelihood that they will ever personally top what they have just done is slim. So slim that the piece before them could very well be the one and only picture that is ever considered their masterpiece, either by the artist or the public, and everything else before and after it will be held up to that level no matter what.

For me that is this picture. The soldiers in the sewer just happened. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I had no source material or inspiration for this picture (despite the apparent similarity to some RPG that people play that I never heard of) and I didn’t even have anything to go off of when it came to fabric which I had problems with before and since. I had never done anything with a character submerged in water so I had no idea how to do that either, it just happened.

The notion that I could ever repeat this again is astronomical. I have come close, but that’s never good enough for me. This is my personal greatest work, even now almost 5 years after I erased the last trace of pencil and stared at it in disbelief.

- please be aware that this is a reposted image and not a brand new deviation