For those of you have been following the progress of my latest painting, Tiger Bride, you’ll be relieved to hear that the damned thing is nearly finished. Today was spent fiddling with minor details such as a the rose petal shower (the petals themselves, up close, look a bit like autopsy tissue samples), the girl’s hands and the tiger’s peculiar harness. I also painted the first layer of the bride’s veil, trying to use the translucent layer of paint to ‘free up’ some of the rather stiff brushwork that characterises the rest of the image.

After fiddling with the painting for most of the morning, I began work on another three canvases, all more or less the same size as Tiger, about 4 foot or 5 foot squarish. One is a funny image of a couple of Victorian looking children cuddling a dodo in a snowstorm (just can’t get enough of those extinct species!) Then there’s a seascape with two girls on a beach, one reaching her arms up to push an animal mask off her face. And the final image is a recurring obsession, a lot like Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, of two figures standing outside an old church. I’ve painted this latter image so many times that today, when I was drawing it up on the canvas, it literally felt like I was tracing the image.

The process of painting extinct species is oddly unsettling. First of all I trawled through old photographs, and representations, of thylacines to try and work out what the Tasmanian Tiger really looked like. As I mentioned in a previous post, the discovery of their ‘stiff, unwaggable tail’ was strangely exciting, as was an old memoir written by an Englishwoman living on the island during the colonial era. It was moving experience to read, though described in dismissive terms, about the sight of a female Tiger hunting with her pups, nose to the ground as she tracked  prey. “A pretty picture” noted the writer with a sniff, unaware that she was documenting a dying breed.

Similarly the Dodo representations tell you as much about the human artist as they do about the animal. Some dodo images are butterball fat, with enviably chunky drumsticks and squat little legs. These images scream “I am food: eat me!” to the viewer. One look at chubby birdy and you can tell in a flash why they went extinct. They’re the Colonel Sanders icons of the Age of Discovery. Hmmnnn…. that advertising jingle springs to mind, “I feel like Dodo tonight, like Dodo tonight”.

Other images show a more graceful elongated duck. One memorable etching depicts a stretched duck-like bird with legs firmly anchored under its bottom, making it unlikely that the bird could ever walk, let alone run away from potential predators. Dodos are variously imagined as deformed pelicans, bulked up macaws or as an exotic version of the Christmas turkey.