A Day Late and…
I know, I know, I said Tuesday and Friday and here it is Thusday. I’m still getting used to WordPress, and my work is nothing if not labor intensive. I spent all day yesterday painting hair on a bison. Bison latifrons is the big, long-horned, high-backed species of the North American Pleistocene. It’s a lot of hair, and it doesn’t simply point from the front to the back, so you have to be aware at all times of direction and “flow” and texture. It’ll be posted here in the not-so-distant future, as soon as it’s up in the museum display at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
For right now, I’m putting up the last animal “portrait” I did for a private client. I painted this Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) for a friend some 8 years ago. The original is acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 inches.
Click here for a much more detailed image.
There’s the idealized animal that we see in our mind and memory, and then there’s the real critter. Whenever I first sketch a cat of any genus other than Panthera, I tend to make the head too big in proportion to the body; cheetahs especially so. First drafts also see my Hippo and Weasel legs too long, and my eagle feet too big (except for Harpies and couple others). The trick is to realize it and make the adjustments.
As I was painting this piece I remember wishing I could paint Wyoming as the background. Up until a few thousand years ago, we had cheetah or very cheetah-like cats here in North America. They still reside here in the evolutionary memory of the Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), and in my dreams.
November 16th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
…evolutionary memory of the Pronghorn…
Oh yes. That thought is as aesthetically apt as the cat is. And that’s one fine cat.
Dang it’s fun to be able to play here again.
Incidentally and relatedly, I have a pile of hedgeballs on the front porch.
November 16th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Ron, hedgeballs probably attract mastodonts and ground sloths, be careful! They’re probably too heavy for the porch. I have at least two sketches of Acinonyx/Miracinonyx chasing Antilocapra. I’ll have to dig one out and finish it; that and a thousand or so other images I’ve sketched. Must paint faster!
November 16th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Tuesdays and Fridays. You’re not a day late, you’re a day early! It is all about the marketing…
Lovely cat!
November 16th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Okay, you coy know-it-alls. Tell ignorant ME why mention of hedgeballs is “incidentally and relatedly” germane.
I looked them up, so I know what they are, but I couldn’t find anything about mastodonts and grount sloths eating them.
I get the part about “pronghorns are as fast as they are because of a now-extinct cheetah-fast predator.” But I’m stumped about hedgeballs.
Something for a future post, OG?
And DAMN this is a beautiful cat! Makes me think they might have a high huggability coefficient.
November 17th, 2006 at 6:07 am
Great painting!
Is a hedgeball what you call a hedgehog when it’s gone into its defensive posture?
(as used in the croquet match in Alice in Wonderland)
November 17th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Hedgeballs are the pulpy fruit of the Osage Orange Tree (Maclura pomifera). Few animals eat the fruit today, and it’s been suggested for a number of good reasons, that our vanished megafauna, mastodonts, mammoth, ground cloths, ate them and were their agent of dispersal. For a nice article about hedgeballs, here’s a link to “our own” commenter Ron Sullivan’s piece: http://www.ecologycenter.org/terrain/article.php?id=13315 .
November 17th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
The Wonders of the Blogosphere…
First - great news! Jennifer and Sean are getting married! They found each other online, blogging physics. Now, I know they are not the first people to find each other online and get married, but, to my knowledge, this is……
November 17th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
OK, now I’m blushing.
Yeah, though. A blast from the past.
November 18th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Beautiful cat, Carl. Yes, they live in my dreams too. Along with all the others who traveled these lands and are now long gone.
I tried to comment here the other day, to welcome you back to blogging, but I seem to hit in some blog warp and it simply would not let me. So, I’m back to say hello and tell you how glad I am that you are back posting. It’s an especially fine treat to see the world through your eyes.
November 19th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Carl, one of my rules of thumb is: All jobs take longer than first estimated.
That’s why I always include a fudge factor (Finnegan’s Finagling Factor) when estimating time and material for repair or remodeling jobs. My experience with nuts. bolts, planks, tools, and dealing with complications not previously considered (an Uncertainty Principle inherent in making and fixing things) has shown that it isn’t necessary to apologize for being late if one initially states that the estimated time to completion may be, in fact, optimistic.
If such is the case, one can allude to their having coped with unforeseen complications with deftness and dispatch, avoiding taking even more time to complete the job.
As a result of this philosophy, I don’t mind waiting for you to finish. The payoff will be worth the wait, I’m sure.
I only wish my boss felt the same about it . . .
November 19th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Wonderful drawing. I really like your work !
Anyway, thank you for the comment on my blog, and I promise to post more comentary with my pictures from now on
November 19th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Lovely colours! Really like what’s going on in the sky. Nice composition too.
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Hedgeballs! I thought they were just called Osage oranges. I just learned recently that the trees were used to make hedges “before barbed wire:. Pictures at this link:
http://monado_canada.blogspot.com/2006/10/osage-orange.html
November 27th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Great to have you back, O’George!
I’m sure I haven’t read your thoughts on the “reintroduction” of megafauna to select parts of the American mid-west. I believe we briefly touched on it once in email conversation, and I know your find work accompanied some of the news reports about the proposals back in ‘05, but could there be a future post on this topic, I wonder?
December 29th, 2006 at 3:03 am
I was so lucky to see a real live cheetah in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania two years ago. It was twenty feet away from our ATV, and it even went in for a kill. So very fast, and very beautiful. If I had been an Egyptian thousands of years ago, I would have loved to have one for a pet. Though I don’t know how compactable they can be in the human-pet department…
As for the reintroduction of megafauna to the Americas, how would that work? Surely, you don’t mean it in a ‘Jurassic Park’ way. I’m guessing its that whole importing wild animals from Africa thing. I’ll tell you how that’ll work, not very well at all! Present day megafauna isn’t the same as megafauna from the past…how did people get this to a serious enough level to actually propose that this be done?
February 4th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
About some extinct animals of our era:
About 1928, my gfather went hunting in the swamp near Redell, La.(3 miles ftrom Mamou) and brought back 2 dead “Swamp Deer” which had antlers, perefectly formed deer, but were about 1 1/2 feet tall. Theyt may have been the last 2 in La. I tremembrer, he also had captured a large bright green parrot, which our cat managed to kill. I saw, later, in the museum at Exposition mark near the coliseum, a srtuffed Asian animal rooom in which there were 2 Burmese Swamp deer. They were the same size and identical with the Louisiana`Swamp Deer. Without proper laws, Cajuns with their Taiyau dogs hunted them all down.
2. I once owned several flying squirrels. (Used to take them to Opelousas High school in a pocket) now they are almost, if not extinct.