No Grounds for Hounds

The “No Grounds for Hounds” design was created to place on t-shirts that a local group and I intend to have printed. The idea is to draw attention to, and discourage, the use of hounds to hunt wolves which will and already does (through bear-hunting) result in vicious encounters bad for both hounds and wolves. I had been researching some Celtic animal patterns and so they inspired this project, which in turn may fuel future work. But in the meantime, I plan to post the design on my Facebook page on October 15th, the beginning of the season as a minor but visible form of protest, and I will encourage my friends to do so at that time also. I will assert rights to the image if it is used in a manner inconsistent with its spirit, but if other wolf advocacy people wish to utilize it, they may with my permission.

Dream II (from an ongoing project)

This isn’t a step-by-step process exactly, more like a 100-steps-by-100-steps. But it reveals more of my working approach than simply posting an image. It was digitally painted, starting with a flat maze that I distorted to fit the perspective I wanted to create. It stems from an ongoing project.

The Subconscious History of a Prowler

A friend from graduate school, who lives in India now, recently posted this Remington image to my Facebook page (miracles of modern media). I was familiar with the image, partly because I went through a period of investigation of Remington’s work early in my education as a painter, partly because I wrote a paper for an Assyrian Art History class during my undergraduate studies comparing the Assyrian Conquest reliefs with Remington’s cowboy paintings (also about conquest), and partly because I tend to notice anything with a wolf in it. But what didn’t occur to me, until recently, is how I had internalized the image and regurgitated it, unconscious of how much I owed to Remington. It is not uncommon, when you are somewhat obsessed with wolves, to come across photos of wolves from trail cameras which I very much attributed as the inspiration for this image. But I think there’s more to it. I think we are what we see and perhaps that should teach us something about how we spend our time looking and what we choose to visually absorb.

(Remington courtesy of Art History News Report; Trail Camera Photo courtesy of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; TINAW Prowler, ink on Arches, copyright N. Gannon 2013).