I sketched out the plan for Tikikaiju – Godzilla having just finished a large tiki version of himself in the jungle, as the snakes look on approvingly. It’s being painted on a quite large 48″ x 60″ canvas. It is being painted for sale, so the final piece will be a little larger since it’ll also have a custom frame.
One of the things I do to both pass the time and to bribe my daughter to eat all her veggies and such is drawing; drawing as a pretext for storytelling. Storytelling is probably the only thing that truly differentiates humans from animals (or so I guess — we’ve made such false assumptions before) and is certainly what holds cultures together and defines them. Sometimes I illustrate the process of creating the food we’re eating. For example, a few nights ago we had a dish that included wild rice and shrimp, so we were talking about Ojibwa culture and what wild rice (manoomin) meant to them, as well as the process of de-veining a shrimp and preparing it for human consumption.
That said, admittedly it’s generally just funny little drawings and stories on junkmail envelopes… I must have hundreds of these lying around the house (that’s both a reflection on how much we draw and how little I clean I suppose, heh).
A friend of ours is having twins and her baby shower is today, so we used these scraps to make her a card over breakfast.
54″x42″ acrylic on canvas with a custom wood frame (click it for full size).
SOLD.
I’ve nearly finished my latest painting. It needs a few minor changes and then just framing. It’s called “The Blind Lizard”, an homage to Millias’s classic painting “The Blind Girl“. In it, all the animals marvel in glee at the spectacle and beauty of the double rainbow, with the exception of the blind lizard who can’t see the rainbows. She can however experience the beauty of the sensation of simply being alive; the feeling of the fresh air after the rain, the sun on her face, and the sounds and sensations around her.
In the past week and a half I’ve been arrested and charged for a crime I didn’t commit, accused of at least three other major crimes I didn’t commit, and really am starting to feel like I’m living in some terrible mystery-thriller movie with all of these orchestrated events going on around me. It’s quite a surreal experience.
Speaking of surreal experiences, I was at the zoo with my daughter on Friday, and I always wonder what the orangutans are thinking as they cluster around the edge of their cells and stare woefully at the crowds tapping on the glass and taking their pictures. With many of the great apes scoring as high as humans on IQ tests, to say nothing of even very simple animals like crows (who use and invent tools), you have to wonder what their world view would be… It’s as if they’re living in The Truman Show but can see the audience the whole time. Do they realize they’re slaves and prisoners? Or because it’s the only thing they’ve ever experienced, they don’t really think about it? With minds that are roughly equivalent to humans, they must at least wonder about it.
Because there has been some evidence of apes that are taught great ape sign language are able to then teach their children or each other, I’ve always had this fantasy that apes could learn human languages and re-enter the wild, eventually emerging in huge numbers, demanding the right to vote or something. But outside of the fact that this is likely biologically impossible, as Douglas Adams wrote in The Great Ape Project,
There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don’t listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that he would be able to tell us of his life in a language that hasn’t been born of that life?… Maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.
I mean, we don’t even tend to listen to other humans that demand rights, and it generally takes decades of legal battles (to say nothing of physical resistance) to get even minor improvements… why would we listen to animals? It’s not as if we’ve granted them any rights, let alone human-level rights (or whatever term you want to give to the rights afforded to we sentient beings that share this planet) — to quote Jeremy Bentham from Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation,
The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor… What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but, “Can they suffer?”
