LETTERS TO THE DUCK

Letters to the Duck is an unfinished collection of paintings, essays, and fictional letters written to a toy duck lost at sea. The idea came to me after reading an article about a cargo ship that sunk in the Pacific, unleashing a horde of bath toys to travel the ocean currents, and the themes loosely address the rampant materialism of our time. I started working on it before The Fabled Ocean and some of the early paintings inspired shorter versions of “Eighty” and “The Holy Mackerel,” which I’d originally planned on including in Letters to the Duck. But after several rounds of revision, I decided not to throw the kitchen sink into one book and the fledgling stories spread their wings from there. It was the right call. I still plan on completing LttD, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to do that any time soon.