I was working on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and kept passing field after field of sunflowers until one day I finally decided to stop and take a closer look. What started as simple curiosity turned into one of those strange little moments that artists probably understand best. The closer I looked at the center of a sunflower, the more the cluster of seeds started to look less like seeds and more like a crowd of tiny people gathered together.

That was the beginning of *People of the Sun*. In my imagination, the sunflower became a small community living inside a flower—a family of seed people surrounding their king and queen, with a few familiar celebrity faces mixed in for fun. The next time you stand in front of a sunflower, take a good look at the seeds and you just might see what I saw. They may even be waving back at you to say, “Hello, we’re here, we’re here!”