2015

It’s more than a year since I posted last and I have been hard at work on the Animalia series. These animals have pulled me in deeper and deeper and I love it. After the debut exhibit in November at the University of Massachusetts’ Hampden Gallery, my next adventures will entail travel so that I can begin to meet the animals I want to paint. My first trip will probably be a short one just a few hours west  to Syracuse to meet their markhors.

This is “Otis,” my first painting of a markhor, the national animal of Pakistan. These wild goats live in the mountains of Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Turning to the internet for reference images, most pictures seem to be American white guys, rifle in one hand, cradling a dead markhor in their other arm. It may be illegal to kill them in Pakistan but otherwise they have a bounty on their heads. Literally. It’s their racks that are getting them killed.

I have my own sights set on Houston and possibly Wichita this year to meet some gorillas, chimps, African elephants, rhinos, orangutans and some of the big cats. I am very much looking forward to this new phase. I expect it will change my paintings somehow. Can’t wait.

 

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