In February 2016, I had lunch with with Tomas Herrera-Mishler, President and CEO of the Balboa Park Conservancy*, in whose office many of the Centennial pictures hang. One of his main projects is fundraising for the restoration of the Botanical Building, and he showed me colorized post card images of what the park looked like a hundred years ago, during the Panama-California Exposition.

Since no oil paintings of the Botanical Grounds from that era are known to exist, I offered to paint a few that might be used for promotional purposes, and the finished canvases were also framed and hung in their offices.

*In 2022 the conservancy merged with other groups and is now called Forever Balboa Park. The paintings still reside on the same walls and have been seen by hundreds of tour groups.