Why One Eye?

I'd like to think this idea was born from a painting I gave my son almost ten years ago now, . but the more I think about it, I can trace it back further, to a grade school art exercise.

It was a lesson in surrealism. We were told to take one object, repeat it five times, and turn it into something else entirely. I chose a common hair comb. Used once for the body, again for the wings, once more for the tail fin, it became an airplane. I crashed that airplane into a scalp of hair, strands twisting through the comb's teeth as its nose buried itself into the top of a head. I turned the scalp into bumpy, fleshy terrain, a hairy jungle the plane had enmeshed itself in.

I was supposed to use the comb five times. So far I'd only used it three. For the last two, I curved the comb into a semicircle, tines pointing out like eyelashes, and made a sun in the sky above my landscape. That sun was also an eye, horrified at the plane crash it had just witnessed.

I can't remember if it got a good grade or a bunch of raised eyebrows. But that year, it was my Mona Lisa.

Many years later, I painted a bunch of eyes into an underwater scene, reusing them to build sea life: fish, an octopus, coral. My son loved it, and he's the proud owner of that weird one-off. It was another seven or eight years before I picked up a brush again. In my entire life, I'd never had the luxury of time to really let my mind wander and paint whatever idea stuck.

That's the cyclops origin story, officially explained by me. Making cyclops creatures cute, a little weird, and hopefully something that makes you smile.