Friday, April 21, 2017

Wolf in an Enriched Setting







Flat countryside full of watery pockets that freeze and melt back into cool swampland triggered this painting. My home region along the Canadian border remains wolf habitat, and for a person a wolf sighting tends to be remarkable and quickly over, since the wolf wants to get away. I wanted to portray one wolf that paused, sadly if I'm not mistaken, alongside me in a manner that so much carnivorous-animal art does not pick up on. When I reflect on North American paintings of the wolf I think of wolves in glorious poses with heads high, or wolf packs engaged in chases. My Tuesday morning wolf from the spring of 2016 paused in a bulldozer's ruts, ducking her head and exuding suspicion at being viewed by someone out a car window. I had a moment's vision of German shepherd dogs made afraid by a family member's loud scolding, in a cowering pose. This wolf cringed with lowering head and ears for a moment, but then regained her dignity and exited tall and trotting, taking no visible path across a poplar grove. 



This art piece aims to extol our continent's lingering timber wolves in all their well-warranted shyness, which helps them save their own lives concurrently with all our industrial expansion, murderous trigger-joy and ingrained superstition about how cruel wolves are and how hungry to eat us, not to mention our fears for our pets and our livestock. The composition seems overpowered by the flatness of the foreground. Depth occurs in layers, with rain clouds behind a distant line of forest suggesting a layer of hills within, and then the grove of 'doghair aspens' like one continuous, many-stemmed tree erupting from the flat meadow behind the wolf. The wolf is assuredly the star of the painting, exposed like a potential victim in front of a human ogler, armed to shoot or merely passive. This land's marshy flatness, from the perspective of the painting, combined with cold climate and soil infertility recommends itself to onlookers who would rather see places still this rustic kept vacant from takeover by our enterprise. But no matter, this little wolf landscape looked too flat and too inconclusive, to my judgment. The open-ended issue for me is how my wolf as shown would or wouldn't convey fear of whatever had put it ill at ease. An art piece about a fleeing, frightened wolf might better be dominated by grass and landforms, the traditional retreat of wild wolves which cover so much countryside ( up to125 miles in a day, according to Barry Lopez in his Of Wolves and Men) in all their questing, long-legged might--the wolf in that picture nearly lost to sight.

So my first wolf scene as it was lacked context. I still needed to show that the wolf knew how to exit from the hazard that comes with a human encounter. That more accurate context invites use of the poetry of little trees whose whole purpose from their tender beginnings is to reclaim open land, making cover for littler and larger lives both plant and animal. The north country's poplars, or aspens, sparkle in the breezes, quivering, delighting us as we cross their expanses. Is it possible that this wolf in art, whose form never underwent any revision except a little more contouring of its fur coat in the meantime, has gained in dignity because a grove of sapling aspens grew up around its route of escape? A bit of added downslope, as well, takes away from the earlier sense that the wolf is heaving and about to get sick, or is in disgrace.







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