creatures great and small

People often ask me how I came up with the idea of painting morphed creatures, wherein goat heads emerge from magnolia blossoms, birch trees have hooves instead of roots, and wolf-headed women roam the forest.  More and more, I chalk it up to my daughter, to [re-]learning to see the natural world through a child's eyes.  This is a world where imagination reigns, and taking the time to watch pill bugs curl up into little ribbed balls, or to sit on the front stoop and watch the rabbits in the yard munching on clover, is a joyful imperative.   And so I as an artist/parent have come to devote my own attention to the natural world in a much keener, more reverent way.  The marvel is how instinctual and automatic this watchfulness is in kids, and how I as an adult have to cultivate it.  My daughter can look at the black eyed susans blooming in our yard and not only imagine, but find it to be completely plausible, that sparrows and finches could be growing out of the center of each flower.  It is that kind of magical worldview, where the boundaries between people, plants, and animals are not only blurred, but fluid, that has infiltrated my work.  And thinking about my work in that way (which probably ultimately refers to mythology, folk tales, and ritual) is starting to feel like a more convincing rationale than the "artist as mad scientist" explanation I've leaned on for so long.

This "ah ha!" moment strikes me as somewhat tardy, and it was said far more eloquently by Christopher Reiger when he wrote about my anima mundi show at Jen Bekman this past spring.  He said: "her hybrids seem less the product of mad science than an active, engaged imagination."  I guess, as the old saying goes, I had to find it out for myself. 

Further on the subject of animals, this creature is going to be in my next painting:

And one of these days, I'll get back to painting these:

The sheep picture is from Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, and the wolf lives at Wolf Hollow in Ipswich, MA.

And now I need to finish a drawing before bed.