MARGUERITA

This is aan oil painting I did for Ballantine Books, back in the early 1990s. I liked doing wrap covers as a single horizontal image for some reason. Maybe it was the feeling of creating an image that could be framed and hung someplace. The prevailing style was to break up the front and back covers, usually with vignettes that told the story. While I did a good number of those, I preferred a single image.

In this piece, I envisioned the lovers amidst some Mayan ruins. I had recently been traveling in Mexico and the memories of Chichen Itza and Uxmal were still fresh. The book was set in Mexico, so voila! Of course you wouldn't really want to lie on the ground like that in Mexico, because of scorpions and spiders. But on a romance book, anything goes!