A Mating Menagerie

It’s amazing how quickly one’s ideas can change, or at least, more focused. A lot’s happened over the past couple weeks: breakups, breakdowns, and breakthroughs. The three B’s. Last I wrote, I was still doing a series of illustrations based on collective nouns. Now, I’m planning on illustrating and writing a book about mating habits and animal sexuality (A Mating Menagerie: Illustrating the Diversity of Animal Sexuality…tentative title). And to a degree, I kinda feel like I’m starting over, but I feel really good about this project. Here’s the sequence of events.

I was having trouble organizing my collective nouns into some sort of cohesive theme—my ideas were all over the place, connected only by the fact that they were based off of these nouns and that I was drawing them (i.e. similar style). One of my GSIs, Ann, suggested that I list out my ideas under various categories like puns/wordplay and political/current events. And by doing that, I realized that most of my illustrations fell under the latter category. From there, I looked at the ideas by themselves, isolated from the collective noun, and realized that I didn’t need to draw multiple animals. So the collective noun wasn’t the base concept for the project, it was just the jumping off point.

But to where I asked myself.

I then made a list of 10 additional animals that I found interesting and would enjoy drawing (hippo, ostrich, jellyfish, armadillo, panda, etc) and read up on their natural history. Certain key phrases or facts just seem to jump out of the text and scream “I need to be illustrated! Pick me!” Things like:

-Hippos, while defecating, will spin their tales to distribute their feces over a greater area (fertilization? So that they dilute it?)
-Ostriches, when two parents and their chicks come across another ostrich family, the two pairs of parents will duke it out in a winner-takes-all-the-children battle. Seriously.
-Pandas, known for their inability to breed in captivity, have been shown panda porn as a form of sex education. Interestingly, it’s not the visual images that teaches them how to copulate, but the sounds.

So for a couple days, I considered doing some sort of illustrated encyclopedia of animal natural histories, of random facts that I found intriguing. The trouble was, it was just too random. I needed to find some sort of umbrella that could organize and provide structure for the illustrations. I reexamined my list of ideas and found that over half of them had to do with mating, sex, or parenting. Aha!

This has led me to check out every single book on animal sexuality in the library (well, I only allow myself to check out ones published after 1990, because research has changed so much with DNA mapping). And I’ve suddenly found myself with even more ideas of illustrations to create, as well as some possible narrative structure…which allows for me to return to the book form.

Here are some notes from my rough outline:
Why even sex in the first place? Asexual reproduction. Hermaphroditic animals. The advantages of sexual reproduction (sharing and fixing genes, less susceptible to diseases and parasites, natural selection). Creation of the sperm and egg cell. Evolution. Male vs. Male competition. Physical and Behavioral adaptations. Female (the ultimate) choice. Symmetry=good health=good genes. The actual act itself. External vs. Internal fertilization. Phallus variations. Sperm competition. Pregnancy/nesting. Parenting, raising the young until they’re able to reproduce themselves. Cyclical.

And out of this research, I have about 40 illustrations I could do. I’ve started to limit the size of my work, to 5x7, and am working at a faster style. See the previous post about the puffins for an idea of what I’m going for.

I’m getting tired of writing, but before I sign off, here are some facts you might find interesting:

-the male mosquito, after inseminating the female, injects a hormone that effectively turns off the female’s sex drive, thus preventing her from mating with any more males.

-the male deep-sea angler is much smaller than the female and when he connects with the female, he remains physically attached until his body joins with her’s, living off her body and providing sperm whenever she desires. For awhile, scientists didn’t realize there was a male sex for this fish; they just thought these smaller dangling parts were some sort of parasite.

-cats, and especially the tiger, have penis’ with backward facing barbs so that they are unable able to disconnect from the female until the erection has subsided.

I’m really excited about this project, and it’s fun too. More later…

Puffins

Just finished. I'll explain the illustration later, but right now, I'm off to see a movie.

changes

I've suddenly realized that I can create the images i want to see without depending on the collective noun or multiple animals.

So what does that mean?

Where does that lead my project and thesis?

The collective nouns have served as a jumping off point, but to where?

An iPod of Whales

THE LIST 2.0

Here's the rough guideline of animals I'll be illustrating over the course of the year. The first 10 contain the true collective noun; for the second ten, I'll be creating my own.

1. a KNOT of toads
2. an ARMY of caterpillars
3. a POD of whales
4. a WISDOM of wombats
5. a TOWER of giraffes
6. a HURTLE of sheep
7. a FLAMBOYANCE of flamingos
8. a CONGREGATION of alligators
9. a BUSINESS of ferrets
10. a MURDER of crows

11. a SHADOW of stingray
12. a SILENCE of pandas
13. an ORGY of snails
14. a of snails
15. a of flying squirrels
16. a of puffins
17. a of chameleons
18. a of stag beetles
19. a of blowfish
20. a of squid

Any suggestions?

In Progress: An iPod of Whales

Abstract. Version 2.0

Here's the latest abstract, though I'm sure it'll change after going over it with my professors and GSIs tomorrow. Time to go, the cafe is closing...

It seems that many of us now live in a society that is more removed from nature than ever before in history. Yet, words and phrases in our language continue to speak of a time when activities like farming and hunting were part of everyday life. "It’s raining cats and dogs." "A gaggle of geese." "The black sheep of the family." Without knowledge of their origins, we begin to redefine their meaning to make sense in our more urban environment. When taken literally or misinterpreted, these phrases become both humorous and pointed remarks on contemporary society. For my Integrative Project, I will be creating illustrations that explore and reinterpret animal lexicon, idioms, and proverbs. Since animals can act as intermediaries between the human and the ecological world, they serve as both strong subjects and narrators. My ink and watercolor drawings will be exhibited together as matted and framed prints for an audience fluent—or at least interested—in the English language. It is my hope that by illustrating such illogical scenes, the viewer will pause and consider the contemporary relationship we now have with nature and it’s inhabitants.

Animal Idioms

From "The Dictionary of Idioms and their Origins" by Linda and Roger Flavell:

-to give someone the bird
-the black sheep of the family
-cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey
-no room to swing a cat
-dead as a dodo
-a lame duck
-an eager beaver
-to drink like a fish
-hold your horses
-knee-high to a grasshopper
-mad as a March hare
-pigs might fly
-raining cats and dogs
-to strain a gnat and swallow a camel
-an ugly duckling

From "Bewildering Beasties"

Originally printed in 1892. It's scary that this appeals to my sense of humor...


A Strawberry Shortsnake


A Toot Owl


A Beebra


An Eelbarrel


A Fountain Penguin


A Furtle


A herd of Kittle

I love that this counts as research.

Final Colors (maybe).

An Army of Caterpillars...almost finished

Abstract: A Menagerie of Illustrations

A gaggle of geese. A murder of crows. A drove of pigs. The origins of these collective nouns date back to 1486 with “The Book of St Albans,” a guide to hawking, hunting and heraldry in medieval Europe. The words now seem like archaic non-sequiturs, but perhaps that is because of our more distant relationship with the natural world. 500 years ago, a “drove of pigs” would have made sense to the farmers that herded, or drove, their swine to the market each week.

Since the publication of “The Book of St Albans,” a linguistic floodgate has been unleashed and naturalists took creative license with the animal collective nouns. Some are logical in that they describe a physical characteristic (a prickle of porcupine), a habitat (a rookery of penguins), or an onomatopoeic feature (a peep of chickens). Others seem assigned randomly, with reasons only the imagination can decipher: a troubling of goldfish or a wisdom of wombats, for example.

Throughout my Integrative Project, I plan to explore these phrases through a series of ink and watercolor illustrations. These works will not be just portraits of animals en masse; rather, they will be layered with explorations of their word origins, natural history, current connotations, and related contemporary issues.


Additional (and somewhat random) thoughts...
A pride of lions originally referred to the regal nature of the “king of beasts” but I’d much rather see them marching in a gay pride parade. A flamboyance of flamingos of course leads me to the same conclusion.

And because goldfish were artificially selected against their naturally occurring brown and gray colors--reserved only for the Chinese royalty-- I see a perfect opportunity to create illustrations that parallel current issues of race and social class. While I have not discovered where “a troubling of goldfish” comes from, I do know where I can take it as an illustration.

My work has been described as “cute” and light-hearted, but also exaggerated and slightly irreverent. The style is clean, finished, and approachable by the audience, but the content can reach much deeper, more serious topics. By using personified animals in my work, I believe that the viewer can recognize parallels in their own behavior, without feeling threatened. Understandably, audiences feel less comfortable looking at drawings of humans having sex than drawings of toads having sex.

Maybe a quick tangent would clarify this idea. During my training as an interpretive ranger at North Cascades National Park, we were instructed on how to create effective programs—campfire talks, trail walks, hands-on exhibits, etc. One point that has continually resonated is that the program should be accessible to all ages and backgrounds; an eight year old should find just as much value as an eighty year old. It is a mighty challenge indeed, but one that always interested me.

So perhaps because of this training, I’ve always assumed that my audience would be everyone and anyone. This is why I believe that animals can be an effective vehicle for more complicated ideas. They are universally accepted and thus, no matter one’s background, the piece becomes inclusive instead of devisive.