Red in tooth and claw
This image, on the left, was the second drawing I made in my Drawing 1 elective while studying Animal&Veterinary Science. The painting on the right (terrible photo) I made later that year, in my first Painting 1 class.
I was concurrently doing a work-study job with The Eagle Project, the effort to assist endangered Bald Eagles’ reproduction by setting up feeding stations stocked with lead-free food. The job was pretty bizarre. First, lead-free animal carcasses had to be obtained. This involved driving Waldo County collecting dead chickens and visiting fur processing facilities to collect skinned discarded corpses of animals trapped and sold for furs. “Collecting” is a sterilized word; in actuality the stinking and gooey things would drip blood from the truck bed they were thrown in. As if that was not enough to get a reputation as a psychopath, the trapped animals had to be beheaded by hatchet in a remote woods location, since the trappers often shot them in the head with lead shot. At least the corpses were frozen white by then, with their mouths open and lips curled back in a snarl, partially caused by rigor mortis. They were transported to winter feeding sites, such as Cobscook Bay, and sledded to the ice by snowmobile. Then the real work began: arriving at a plywood box “blind” before daybreak, bundled against the cold, to observe through a scope the feeding over long days, making notes and recording banded eagles’ numbers. First, the ravens appeared noisily and announced safety to the more cautious eagles. Up to fifty eagles at a time would feed, both adults and juveniles. Occasionally other carnivores would show up. Pecking orders were evident within and between species.
I got to thinking about the phrase “red in tooth and claw”, used to describe cruelty in nature by Alfred Lord Tennyson. What I was seeing was visceral, literally, and shocking to modern sensibilities, but the understanding of predator-prey relationships in ecology was a recognition of balance, of a whole. An indigenous man I know, Barry Dana, recently responded to a social media post about cruelty in humans eating animals, and said something to the effect of “in nature there is no such concept” (of cruelty). True. There is survival, or not.
When people first saw this drawing they thought it was about power, domination, rape even! They had no idea what I was actually spending my days looking at, nor did they understand the beauty in it. While I definitely was not thinking at the time about the yin-yang symbol, which others have mentioned, I was thinking about contrasts, cycles, balance. I was not thinking of symbols. I was just drawing what I saw grounded in everyday physicality during a Maine winter. Now, the drawing has layers of meaning to me.
After many years of experimentation, I find myself gravitating back to my very first images, like this one. I am not simply recognizing the seeds of themes and tendencies in later art, although I do see those, for sure. I am feeling that these earliest images are stronger, as if there was something pure and channeled without the resistance of education or ego. I am referring to something energetic, not technical or even conscious, since they predate any development, either technically or consciously. Do you think many artists essentially do a lifelong circle back towards some pure impulse? I suspect so. I suspect that spiraling and cycling over and over is how one truly understands a thing, in general. As a child, something gains one’s attention. It has magic, but you have no basis of experience with which to know why. In later reiterations of attention one adds layers of context, angles from which it can be viewed, factual awareness, and poetic associations, until ultimately the thing one noticed years ago becomes a metaphor for much larger forces become evident over years of living. So, the thing becomes a talisman.
