I only have one memory, of when I was very young, and I was trying to go on an adventure. My mother always said that I was running away, but really all I wanted to do was to see what was around the corner. So, all my life I have been looking around the corner and trying to discover things, and I have succeeded. I call this "The Pioneer", the little guy with his little toy, coming off the bricks into the wilderness. And it's the wilderness that has been my passion for all these years. The painting is 28 x 28 inches, I painted it in 1976, and its oil on canvas. I gave this to my mother because she liked the sketch I did.

A Decade's Worth of Sketches

As Vernon states, with some ideas it takes a quite a bit of time to take it from thumbnail sketch to a few more iterations of sketches, to finally arrive at a paintable subject base.

With this painting, Vernon went through various stages of composition in creating the central figure, indeed going with and finally without hair. Furthermore, taking a look at the various iterations of the figure, you see he went from being an aged boy with hair, to an infant-looking child with no hair.

So, why no hair? Well, Vernon paints with no hair seeing as he'd like to keep his subjects as non-sexualized and non-historically categorizable as possible. All this to keep them from being placed in space in time, in essence, rendering them timeless.