An Elephant a Day 2.0

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

Sunday, 24 November 2013

Elephant No. 78: Feature Artist Christopher Griffin

Bronze elephant cast in India.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

I first saw Christopher's elephants at Nuit Blanche Ottawa in September 2012, and was quite taken with them. They were the first thing I saw that night, and I really liked the interactive nature of his installation. Not only were there waist-high concrete elephants made by Christopher, but members of the public were also invited to shape small elephants in clay to leave behind.

The concept behind the installation, which he'd called Life is Beautiful, was that it "would be beautiful to discover a herd of elephants flourishing and increasing in numbers" and to "have the public create small clay elephants to cling to the backs of Mother Ship elephants for safety." At the time, I was nearing the end of my original Elephant a Day blog, and I can't count the number of friends who asked me the following day if I'd seen Christopher's elephants. I'm glad I could say yes, or I would have been mighty disappointed.

Little clay elephants on the back of one of the Nuit Blanche elephants.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

The installation was swamped when I happened by, so I didn't get to make an elephant that evening. I remembered his elephants of course, but thought little more about them until I happened to be driving down Gladstone Avenue with a friend. Suddenly there they were, milling about alongside his studio.

Concrete elephant.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

Although Christopher's elephants are highly stylized, my friend recognized them right away for what they were, and said—only half-jokingly, I think—that we should put party hats on them and take photographs. Instead, I decided to contact Christopher to see if he'd mind my featuring him on this blog.

Christopher is a local artist who paints, in addition to working in concrete and other sculptural materials. Many of his paintings feature stylized animals in a bold style that particularly appeals to someone like me, since I tend to be a bid timid about going bold.


Nepean Street Herd—Ottawa Street Series 2013 Mixed media on canvas Photo: Christopher Griffin Source: http://www.christophergriffin.ca/gallery.html

Black HareAsphalt, concrete and oil on canvas
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Source: http://www.christophergriffin.ca/gallery1.html

Walking the Dog (2008)
Oil on canvas
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Source: http://www.christophergriffin.ca/gallery2.html

Part of Christopher's work also includes concrete friezes, created directly on the sides of buildings. In fact, Christopher became famous here about five years ago for having decorated all four sides of his home with concrete, incised with wild and wonderful figures and patterns. Since then, he's gone on to decorate a number of local buildings in a similar way. One of my favourites is this raccoon—part of a frieze on a local privacy wall, which was a rather unprepossessing brick before Christopher got his creative hands on it.

Raccoon from righthand side of concrete frieze at 441 Maclaren Street,
Ottawa—October 2012
Photo: David Barbour
Source: http://www.christophergriffin.ca/concrete.html

Raccoon frieze at 441 Maclaren Street, Ottawa—October 2012
Photo: David Barbour
Source: http://www.christophergriffin.ca/concrete.html

About his work, Christopher has written:

I am inspired by ancient artwork on cave walls, children's art and random markings on concrete sidewalks, roads and buildings. I find the immediacy, confidence and lack of pretense in their character very appealing. I emulate this chaotic beauty in the surfaces of my own work with a description I call "visual noise". Scribbles, gestural markings and accidentals mirror our hectic, image-laden society and provide the spark of inspiration for me. I often use bird, fish and animal motifs in my work because they represent the pure, the innocent and the spiritual.

In addition to making his own elephants, Christopher often donates his time to schools and special events, encouraging people to make clay elephants as a way of exploring their creativity. I particularly love the two elephants below, made by students in a Grade 3 class.

Elephant by unknown artist—Grade 3 class, First Avenue Public School,
Ottawa.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

Elephant by Kalyna Griffin—Grade 3 class, First Avenue Public School,
Ottawa.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

Christopher's elephants have appeared around the world in recent years, from India to Mexico. And sometimes his smaller elephants show up in rather eccentric places. Which, I'm pretty sure, is exactly where elephants like to be.

Elephant at the beach in Yelapa, Mexico.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

Over the past decade or more, Christopher's paintings and sculptures have been featured in solo and group exhibitions across North America. To see more of his work, visit his website at www.christophergriffin.ca

Elephant in drainpipe, Rideau Canal, Ottawa—February 2013.
Photo: Christopher Griffin
Image courtesy of Christopher Griffin

Elephant Lore of the Day

Since Christopher's elephants have shown up Mexico, I thought I'd write today about Precolumbian elephant sculptures.

Although scientists are fairly certain elephants have never roamed Central and South America, there are a number of Precolumbian finds that may suggest otherwise. If not elephants, perhaps the memory of some elephant-like antecedent was passed down through generations of artisans—until the representations became so stylized that it's become easy to dismiss them as anything but elephants.

Archaeologist Alfred Maudslay's drawing of glyphs at Copan, Honduras,
A.D. 400–800. In recent years, it has been suggested that the creatures on
either side are blue macaws, which are indigenous to the region.
Source: http://resrustica.blogspot.ca/2010/02/elephant-glyphs-at-copan.html

There is a lot of vaguely kooky speculation out there about the possibility of elephants lurking in South American jungles—and even roaming open lands in the United States—as recently as 500 years ago. Most scientists, however, believe that anything resembling an elephant died out in the Americas at least 10,000 years ago.


Precolumbian figure (no date given) described in an auction catalogue as a "coati head fragment." Source: http://s8int.com/WordPress/wp-images/pre%20co%20elephant.jpg

Not being a scientist, archaeologist or crypto-zoologist, I'll let you make up your own mind about this well-known trio of Precolumbian "elephants". To read one of the more comprehensive online articles featuring ancient elephants in the Americas, click here.

Elephant-shaped pot (no date given) described by
its home museum as a "toy".
Collection of the Museo antropolgía de Xalapa,
Xalapa, Mexico
Photo: Zecharia Sitchin
Source: http://www.sitchin.com/elephant.htm

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Elephant a Day is Changing

Leaf collage elephant by Sheila Singhal
Elephant No. 50—October 22, 2013
Source: http://elephantaday2.blogspot.ca/2013/10/elephant-no-50-
leaf-collage.html

New contracts and preparations for Christmas are taking all of my time these days, so I've decided to take a break from daily blogging about elephants. I'll still be sharing the work of anyone who sends me an elephant image or story—and even occasionally posting elephants of my own—although perhaps not on a daily basis for the foreseeable future.

Rather than renaming the blog An Elephant Once in a While, I'll be keeping the Elephant a Day name since, as someone pointed out, that's the way this whole thing started. And who knows: at some point I may go back to daily blogging—although hopefully not daily making, so that I can concentrate on producing more finished art.

In addition to viewing new posts via this site, you can track the blog via Tumblr, via the Elephant a Day website, via Facebook, and via Twitter. You can also view the crazy 366-day blog experience that started it all here.

In the meantime, don't forget to support worthy elephant charities. Elephants are critically endangered in many parts of the world, due to poaching, habitat loss and human-elephant conflict. If you love elephants, please consider making a small donation to one of the organizations working so hard to ensure that elephants have a future.

See you soon!

Vincent van Gogh Elephant by Sheila Singhal
Elephant No. 9—September 11, 2013
Source: elephantaday2.blogspot.ca/2013/09/elephant-no-9-
vincent-van-gogh-elephant.html

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

Monday, 18 November 2013

Elephant No. 77: Art by Elephants

A Splash of Colour by Jojo the elephant.
Source: http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/1319.php

As I've mentioned before in the lore section of this blog, people often ask me whether or not elephants can really paint. What I usually tell them is: it depends.

Elephants naturally trace abstract swirls and patterns in the dust with their trunks, and often do this in a repetitive manner that is unique to each elephant. This means that, when handed a brush and paint, many elephants will take to the activity immediately, tracing similar patterns on paper.

It is unlikely that elephants have a good colour sense, and they have surprisingly poor eyesight, so keepers usually choose paint colours for the elephants. However, what few people realize is that some elephants genuinely like painting. In many zoos and refuges around the world, painting is part of elephant-enrichment programs. In properly designed and managed painting programs, elephants are never forced to paint, and only elephants with a true interest in the activity continue.

They're Building Over There by Wanalee the elephant.
Source: http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/9131.php

Training usually begins with teaching an elephant how to hold the brush. Many elephants will naturally curl their trunks around the brush, but some programs modify the brushes to allow them to fit comfortably inside one of the nostrils, which seems to make the elephants happier, and gives them a greater range of motion.

Next, the elephants are taught how to stand near the easel and how to daub paint on paper. Just as some elephants take readily to banging their trunks around on a piano, some elephants really appear to enjoy the feeling of slopping paint onto paper.

Aquatic Serenade by Jenny the elephant.
Source: http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/1309.php

What elephants do not do naturally is paint landscapes, vases of flowers, or self-portraits. Training that forces elephants to produce things that are recognizable to humans is unnatural. Not only does this type of painting require brushstrokes that are both physically and mentally difficult for elephants, but the training itself can often be coercive in nature. Such paintings are designed for the tourist trade, not as a form of elephant enrichment.

The video below shows an elephant producing a painting of an elephant holding a flower. While it's astonishing to realize that an elephant can be trained to paint something like this, it's still not natural.

In the past, some elephants have taken up painting for a while, only to grow bored with it. In those cases, a sensible enrichment program allows the artist his or her space, perhaps introducing another medium—such as mud—or realizing that the elephant artist has produced his or her life's work and will likely choose not to paint again.

And, if you think that elephants can't possibly understand the connection between what they're doing with their trunk and and the image appearing before them, remember that elephants are among the only animals able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and are among the few with a significant understanding of cause and effect.

To read more about the abstract art produced by elephants at the National Elephant Institute in Thailand, click here.

My Best Shot by Jojo the elephant.
Source: http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/1335.php

Elephant Lore of the Day
My friend Nahal sent me this photograph yesterday, which she took of the door to the Linda Modern Thai Restaurant in Toronto, Canada.

The three-headed elephant depicted on the door is the Thai version of the Hindu elephant Airavata, which was the mount of the god Indra. In Thailand, the elephant is known as Erawan, and usually has three—or even 33—heads, as it looks like he has here. The heads often have more than two tusks apiece—as they do on the door below—and some traditional statues show Indra riding Erawan.

To learn more about the Linda, considered one of Toronto's finest Thai restaurants, click here.

Doorway to Linda Modern Thai Restaurant,
North York (Toronto), Canada.

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

Sunday, 17 November 2013

Elephant No. 76: Glass Canes

I bought a bag of something called "glass gems" for my original Elephant a Day blog and never used them, so I thought I'd finally try making something with them today.

They looked interesting enough in the package, but when I poured them out, I realized it was going to be difficult to make an elephant out of them. Aside from a few slightly rounded pieces, most of the glass was sticklike, meaning that making an elephant was going to be about as much fun as making an elephant from popsicle sticks. Sigh.

I used clear marine silicone to glue things together, as I figured it would be the most likely thing to form a permanent bond with glass. I think this is what I used to make an elephant from marbles in the original Elephant a Day blog.

I started by gluing two pieces together for the elephant's back. So far, so good. The silicone takes about a half-hour to form a bond strong enough to allow you to move on, so I worked on different parts of the elephant concurrently.

I worked on the head next, which was a bit of a pain. The head itself is made up of three layers of glass, surrounded by three ear "sticks" on each side. The head sandwich was easy enough, but keeping the ears together required me to do one side at a time, propped up with other bits of glass to keep it from collapsing while it set. The trunk, on the other hand, was a breeze.

While the head was sorting itself out, I added a pair of glass curves to the lower body, along with some legs. The legs were also a huge pain, and had to be detached and reattached so often that I nearly gave up on them. And, although I tried to splay them enough to allow the elephant to stand up, they didn't stay that way, no matter what I did.

I attached the body and head next, which required a great deal of propping up and binding together while it set. It collapsed so many times that this whole thing almost ended up as a pile of colourful powdered glass.

To finish the elephant, I stuck on a broken bit for a tail. This was probably the easiest part of the entire exercise.

It looked interesting when it was all put together, but it was incredibly messy. There was a film of silicone over everything—and once silicone is stuck to glass, it wants to stay stuck. I must have spent at least two hours scraping away errant bits of silicone so that the glass would be shiny again, and so that it didn't end up with raggedy blobs of silicone all over the place.

In the end, I like the way it turned out as an object, but I would be very reluctant to try this again. It took too much propping up, fell apart too often, and took too long to clean up. And it doesn't stand up.

Then again, it looks pretty in a window—and I still have almost an entire bag of glass left to play with—so I suppose never say never.

Elephant Lore of the Day

In Chartres Cathedral in France, elephants are among the few exotic animals featured in the stained-glass window depicting the story of Noah.

Seen approaching the ark from the righthand side, about a third of the way up the window, the elephants have tiny mouse-like ears, and are primarily recognizable by their tusks and long noses.

Given that Chartres Cathedral was built between A.D. 1194 and 1250, the artists who produced the stained-glass windows would likely never have seen an actual elephant, and would have had only anecdotal descriptions and other equally erroneous depictions to go by.

That being said, I love this pair of elephants. Who knows: it may even inspire me to finally try my hand at stained glass.

Animals approaching the ark, two by two.
Noah Window, Chartres Cathedral, France, ca. A.D. 1205–1235
Source: http://www.medievalart.org.uk/chartres/47_pages/Chartres_Bay47_key.htm

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)

Saturday, 16 November 2013

Elephant No. 75: From the Archives—Thaumatrope

First posted this on January 11, 2012, in the original Elephant a Day blog.

I've always been enchanted by optical toys and illusions, so today I thought I'd try to make a thaumatrope.

Thaumatropes—a name derived from the Greek words thauma ("wonder") and tropos ("turn")—were popular toys in Victorian times. Each thaumatrope consists of a cardboard disc with pictures on both sides, threaded onto a pair of strings. When the strings are twirled, the two pictures appear to combine into a single image. This is due to a principle once known as persistence of vision, by which the retina was thought to retain images long enough for them to blend together. This has since been explained as a phenomenon rooted in the brain's perception of motion.

The thaumatrope is most commonly credited to John Ayrton Paris, who in 1824 used a thaumatrope to demonstrate "persistence of vision" to the Royal College of Physicians in London, England. His invention was based on the ideas of astronomer John Herschel and geologist William Henry Fitton, the latter of whom is also sometimes said to have invented the thaumatrope. Others give credit to Charles Babbage, inventor of the world's first mechanical computer.

The range of images on thaumatropes is vast, the most famous of which is a bird in a cage. Sayings, poems or riddles are also sometimes inscribe along the outside of the disc. There is an excellent collection of thaumatropes, many of which can be viewed in action, on the delightful and informative Richard Balzer Collection website.

For today's elephant, I decided to draw a "naked" elephant on one side, with a hat and clown suit on the other side. Hopefully, when the thaumatrope is spun, the two will blend. The faster the disc spins, the stronger the illusion of a single image.

Making a thaumatrope is quite simple. To start, you need two cards or discs of identical size and shape. I opted to cut a couple of discs measuring about 7.5 cm (3 inches) in diameter, since this is the traditional thaumatrope shape. I used a lightweight bristol board, but any light cardboard will do. Index cards are also recommended on some sites offering instructions on making thaumatropes.

Once you have the discs cut, you can either punch the holes in the sides right away, or start your first drawing. I didn't want to punch the holes quite yet, so I sketched an elephant in the middle of one disc with pencil. I lightly sketched the hat and clown outfit as well, so that I would have some idea of how it would look when I did the reverse side. Once I was happy with the elephant, I went over it with a permanent black marker and erased the pencil lines. I also put small black dots where I intended to punch holes.

To create the second drawing, you need to be able to see the first drawing. The easiest way to do this is either hold it up to a window and trace, or use a light table. I used a window, because I don't actually have a light table. Shocking, I know. In addition to drawing the hat and clown outfit, carefully leaving out any parts of the elephant, I added a few confetti dots in the background, and repeated the small punch-out dots.

Then I decided both sides needed a bit of colour, so I painted them with watercolour.

The thaumatrope was now ready to be assembled. The most important thing to remember here is that the discs must be upside-down to one another. I don't know why this is—and it's beyond me to either understand or explain it—but I do know that, if you don't make them opposite to one another, the thaumatrope will look really weird. In this case, the hat would float around in the space below the elephant's body as soon as I set it spinning.

To finish the thaumatrope, you need to make holes in the two discs, and attach loops of string, or elastic bands, on either side. I pierced the holes with a large needle, and used red embroidery floss for the string.

Double over the string and feed it through both discs.

Feed the cut ends through the loop and tighten.

Tie knots in the cut ends. This not only finishes it off nicely, but gives you a place to loop your fingers when spinning the thaumatrope.

Now comes the magic part. To spin the thaumatrope, I twirled it between my fingers until the string was tightly twisted. As soon as I pulled the two pieces of string out to the sides, the thaumatrope began to spin, and the pictures blended together. This was hard to photograph with just me to both spin and record, but you get the idea. Interestingly, there are no single shots in the original clip in which both sides of the disc are visible, so your eyes and brain really are responsible for this entire illusion.

This was technically quite easy, and only took extra time because I wanted to carefully draw and paint it to give it an old-fashioned feel.

I like the final result a lot, and may even make a few for friends someday.

Elephant Lore of the Day

Elephants have the largest brains of all mammals, and are highly intelligent. In addition to being able to work out problems, they often alter their behaviour in response to new challenges.

They are also excellent escape artists. In the 1970s, at Marine World Africa in the United States, an Asian elephant named Bandula figured out how to either break open or unlock several devices used to secure the shackles on her feet. The most complex of the devices was a brommel hook, which closes when its two sides slide together. Bandula fiddled with it constantly, finally learning how to slide the hook apart by aligning the sides.

Once Bandula freed herself, she helped the other elephants to escape along with her. There was a certain element of cunning involved as well: before escaping, Bandula and her companions looked around to be sure that no one was watching before they ran away.

Similarly, a female elephant described in Eugene Linden's book, The Octopus and the Orangutan: More Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence and Ingenuity, worked out how to unscrew iron eye bolts measuring 2.5 cm (1 inch) in diameter. Using her trunk to create leverage, she managed to completely untwist the bolt and free herself.

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)