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The frog paintings represent an important step in my development as a painter. When I began the series, I was painting still life, from a setup and more or less realistically.     The first several paintings in the series (not shown here) were of that sort. After a while, however, the frog left the setup table and embarked on a journey. The paintings became less dependent on the set up and more dependent on imagination and some sort of narrative running through the works. (Apparition is a painting from this stage of the series.)     Next, I began to paint multiple frogs and to use the frog as subject matter in paintings concerned with more formal aspects of painting, e.g. composition, color, movement.     With the frog painting, I tried to move to some place within me and, even though the paintings are visually based upon a "real" object, they are also about the emergence of a personal view; an internal journey of a sort.     After I had finished with this series of paintings, I was browsing the Joseph Campbell website and discovered that frogs are a symbol of the opening of individual creativity. This coincidence, since the frogs did not have that symbolic meaning for me at the time, seems strangely appropriate.