The Journey
“The Journey” - January 2026
12"x18" - watercolor, ink & gel pen on watercolor paper
There was a poster on the wall of one of my childhood classrooms depicting a pig with angel wings on a black background above the bold, white word, “BELIEVE.” My general understanding of this poster as a child was that if you believed in Jesus hard enough, then the pigs that you ate would go to heaven.
In my defense, every other time I saw a being with angel wings slapped on it, I was SUPPOSED to assume that it was in heaven. I was a child with very little media literacy outside of the Holy Bible… and even that was spotty theology at best.
I later connected it to the phrase “when pigs fly” and realized that somebody used the power of Photoshop to create a poster that my teacher (who was probably not much older than I am now) thought was amusing enough to include in their self-funded classroom decor.
I had the idea of “Squeal Armstrong,” the first pig in space. I started the sketch with Squeal posed in an Apollo-era spacesuit holding their helmet proudly in front of the moon and an American flag… but the sketch didn’t feel right. Squeal needed to actually be in space. They needed to be DOING the flying already.
I used to go to pig races at the Kansas State Fair and remember the leap of victory at the end. I found an image of one of these victorious pigs and used it as the reference. I then swapped the typical “real” spacesuit for a diver-style helmet and tank, partially because I wanted to do more of the fur texture and partially because I wanted it to invoke more of a “space adventure” vibe.
I’d replaced the pig and the wings; now I only had to decide how to interpret the big white "BELIEVE." You can grab a pig by its little pig shoulders and shake it and yell “BELIEVE IN YOURSELF” all you want and feel as though you’ve done your job to inspire the pig. But…
The pig develops a passion for flying when it is read stories about flight, when it observes flying animals in nature, and has their imagination shaped by stories of the adventure of spaceflight. The pig develops a sense of deciding if flying is worth the challenge by trying things other than flying, by studying and exploring, and coming to the conclusion that the possibility of flying is worth the potential of falling.
Perhaps I could whisper back through a wormhole in a poster on a classroom wall. What would seem inspirational to this child, covertly praying that the pig whose bacon she ate for breakfast was enjoying heaven?
The items around the pig are a few of the many examples of things that I remember being really excited about. Every now and then, I see the echoes of those old items in new things that I’ve grown to love. And the echos of my favorite objects now will be built into the next frontier, the next spark of an idea that those devoid of my context may deem far too absurd.
I depicted three constellations added by Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer in the 18th century who wanted to immortalize human-made tools for their advancement of society. I included the microscope, the compass, and the artist’s easel because those are items that help us discover who we are, decide where we want to go, and express the joys and struggles of that journey to others.
