In 1998, I did extensive murals for a Denver aquarium called Colorado’s Ocean Journey. The largest mural was 60 feet tall by 300 feet long.

The project was well executed but seemed a bit ill-conceived: an aquarium with other animals, like tigers, and thrills like the flash flood that periodically surprises people moving through an artificial canyon. The coherence escaped me. But the large skies and the tall rainforest around the tiger exhibit made it a joy to paint.

I was interviewed by Denver’s Channel 4 while there.

A few years after the Ocean Journey opened I was sad to hear that it had closed. It was bought by a restaurant chain from Texas and turned into a successful novelty restaurant. However improbable it sounds, the new owners kept the Journey’s fish and animals, including two tigers, and converted the aquarium into a multilevel restaurant. The concept was so successful that they decided to build another one from scratch in their own back yard, Houston, Texas. I did the murals for that one, too — see Downtown Aquarium Restaurant.