I had wanted to go to the Everglades even as a kid after watching documentaries on television about “The River of Grass”. Unfortunately, despite going to Florida several times, it wasn’t until I was 45 years old that I finally made it there. In Dec 2020 we took a family vacation to South Florida and visited both the sawgrass swamp where we walked the boardwalk and took a boat tour of the southern coastal mangrove forest.

I wanted to paint both the sawgrass and mangrove environments and to include a manatee underwater and emphasize the numerous animals we encountered, which would be a complicated effort. I had a basic idea in mind which I created below.