An Old, Stinking Elephant

-April-

This is my favorite piece! I was inspired by a quote by Daniel Richter that went something like, 'Sometimes art is like a fresh breeze wafting around the corner, and sometimes it's like a stinking old elephant lumbering by.' (I've only ever seen it at the Daniel Richter exhibit at the DAM, so I don't know exactly what it was. A bit more awesome, but pretty much the same thing.) Anyways, I really liked this image, so I decided to paint it using watercolors and relate it to my theme via the story about the elephant in a dark room. I'm sure you know it, but I'll just refresh your memory- it's the story of an elephant in a part of the world that has never seen any elephants, and it is put in a dark room and people go in to 'see it.' Everyone goes in and feels a different part of it and thinks it's something else, like someone thinks its leg is a tree, someone else thinks its ear is a fan, yet another person thinks its back is a table. The point of this is that everyone has different ideas, even if they're about the same idea. I've heard this used to describe religions, but I decided to apply it to myths, since cultures have so many myths that describe the same thing but are all different, so I wanted to show the uniqueness of mythology but the universality of what it describes.

For this, I decided to make the elephant all sorts of random colors, since color is the element of art that appeals to me the most. To make it more interesting, I used the surrealistic technique of dripping a liquid down the page to make the different areas of color mingle together. Then, to make it more bold, I outlined it in black. This, doing the actual elephant, was the quick part and it only took me an afternoon. The background took a lot more consideration, since I couldn't leave it white but I didn't want it black, and I didn't want to overuse one color by putting it in the background. After a long while, the suggestion was made (by "La Llama en Llamas") that I should use zebra print in the background, which was really the best idea I could hope for. It wasn't all black or all white, or any of the colors, and it even added to the contrast and the idea, referring to the story by suggesting a question of whether it was an elephant or a zebra. In the end, the color, contrast, and texture of this piece made me really like it.