The long-standing admiration Landers had for the paintings of American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1920), particularly his depictions of the ocean, served as a major source of his inspiration. Time and distance are represented by the wide and erratic ocean, which has been a prominent motif in Landers' paintings. As Landers explains "When I first tried painting the ocean in the early 1990s [...] it was quite difficult to do even though I was at the beach in Amagansett, NY, looking at the ocean every day. So I turned to the American painter Winslow Homer to learn from. This dog and ocean series was based on him.”