Beyond Biology

I spend a month or more in England every year. During this time you can find me drawing at London’s Grant Museum of Zoology (founded as a teaching collection in 1828), where old specimens float in jars of methylated spirits or peer from glass cases. There’s a range of animals boxed or shelved or pickled there, from extinct dodo bones to a common pigeon, plucked and sliced open, its ashen heart revealed. Some specimens were even dissected by the likes of Thomas Huxley and other contemporaries of Darwin. Entering the Grant through heavy wooden doors, I leave the chaotic London streets behind to enter this quiet cabinet of curiosities. I’m in my element there since I’m obsessed with how we alter the living world through collecting. But what lures me to draw certain specimens? It's difficult to explain. (A taxidermied animal posed in a “habitat” wouldn’t have the same effect.) At one time, I thought it was a gut reaction because I often feel the animal’s gesture within my own body. Yet while that’s part of it, there’s something more. That “something” has to do with the animal's remote expression, an expression far removed from the creature’s scientific purpose, while also equally removed from what it once was in the wild. After drawing at the Grant, I transpose my quick studies of each specimen—be they whole or dissevered—into painted portraits. I nestle those images beneath layers of suggestively painted Plexiglas, rewilding the animals not to the natural world but to our own untamed vision, beyond biology. [caption id="attachment_9702" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Bestiary (Stag Beetle)   12 x 12 inches    Mixed media    2020[/caption]   [caption id="attachment_2962" align="aligncenter" width="594"] The Grant Museum of Zoology on Gower Street, London[/caption]  

Collecting the Wild / 30 x 24 inches / acrylic on canvas /  2017

[The whale, turtle, lizard, and snake are all based on specimens at the Grant Museum.]