Lions & Tigers & Bears

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

I used to do bodies of work in the media and style I thought best conveyed the ideas I wanted to express. This led to an array of work that some called schizophrenic but to me made total sense. My reading habits are similarly broad and obsessively deep. One such body of work involved text and intaglio and lions, tigers, bears, rhinos, etc. I happened to be learning intaglio, which along with etching seemed like an utterly 19th century medium. I was somehow at the time reading historical accounts of the big game hunters in Africa and Asia. I was simultaneously delighted and horrified by the text. One moment I am reading a safari shopping list which included exotic marmalade, linens, bubblebath and gin and the next moment racist comments about the dark-skinned human beings who were made to recreate upper crust environments for the big game hunters in the wilderness. Not to mention the contrast between the dark-skinned scouts and trackers who actually had the expertise to find the big game and keep their employer safe versus the braggadocio of the great white “hunters” who posed before their gruesome trophies. There were also accounts of the man-eating “tiger of Tsavo” and other vilifications of big game species. The series of intaglio prints involved silhouettes or simplifications of each big game animal, often flayed or skinned, along with a ghost print. The full color prints were deeply layered with overlapping patterns and some archaic symbols. On the pale ghost prints I used an old-fashioned fountain pen loaded with walnut ink to write fragments of the texts in a florid cursive hand. The text, sometimes upside down, was fragmented and interwoven with parts of the image. This was different from how I’d used text in imagery before in an attempt to marry or entangle the image with its history.

From R to L: Black Rhino, Black Rhino Ghost, Man Eater of Tsavo, Man Eater of Tsavo Ghost, Standing Bear, Standing Bear Ghost

Intaglio and Ink, 12”x18”, with hand-written text extending into the margins.