The Cow-Tail Switch

-October-

This was my first attempt at acrylic painting since my 8th grade personal project, and I was basing it off of an African folk tale, in which there is a man, a great hunter with many children, who goes off into the woods one day and is never seen again. His family pretends that nothing happens and goes on as usual until his baby son is born. When his son is old enough to talk, he asks his siblings where his father is, and they decide to go out and find their father. They go out into the woods and after a short while, they find their father's skeleton, where he was attacked by a leopard. One of them knows how to put his bones back together, another knows how to sing flesh back onto the bones, and et cetera. Together, the hunter's children bring him back to life, and lead him back to the village. Everyone is excited about his return, and there is a huge party. The hunter slaughters his best cow for this ceremony, and makes its tail into a magnificent switch, the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen. At the celebration, everone asked to touch the switch, but the hunter wouldn't let them. At the very end, he said that he would give the switch to the child who had done the most to bring him back to life. All of his children rushed forward to say how important their role had been, but their father stopped each of them. After all of his children had bickered over who deserved the switch the most, the hunter reached down and gave the switch to his baby son, who hadn't even said anything, for he was the one who had remembered the hunter. And, as he said, 'No one is truly dead until they are forgotten.'

In this piece, I was using the switch to represent life, by using color, shape and contrast. All of these together showed the difference between life and death: life was free, loose, and made up of curvy shapes while death was represented with geometric shapes; life was made out of hot colors and death of cold colors; and life was bright against death's dark background. For this, I had to use different techniques, especially to get the different textures in the piece. In the background, I used masking to get the different shapes and impasto to color them. On the switch, I got the scribbly texture by rolling a piece of thread in paint and then pressing it to the canvas. Overall, though, this isn't a very exciting piece.