Tuesday, 21 January 2014

Elephant No. 88: Get Well Card




One of my friends recently had surgery, so I decided to make her a get well card. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was to buy a card, then I remembered that I can sort of draw, and that perhaps a handmade card might be nicer.

I knew the kind of thing I wanted to draw—an elephant in a bed with a thermometer in its mouth—but that was about it. And, as anyone who works in the visual arts will tell you, knowing what you want something to look like doesn't mean it's going to actually end up looking like that at all.

I started by cutting a piece of 9 x 12-inch (22.9 x 30.5 cm) watercolour paper in half, then folded it in half again, giving me a drawing surface of 4.5 x 6 inches (11.5 x 15.25 cm).

I sketched something out. The angles of the bed are wonky and the perspective is off, but I thought it would be okay. I know she likes birds, so I also put a couple of birds in the window.




Because I wanted to use watercolour pencils for this, I used a pigment liner to outline things, allowing me to erase the pencil lines below. When I was finished, I heat-set the pen lines with a hairdryer.




I coloured everything with watercolour pencils, adding some texture to the walls and floor at the same time.




Finally, I painted over everything with water. Kind of cute, in the end. Here's hoping it helps her feel better soon!





Elephant Lore of the Day
Producing an elephant get well card made me wonder how people can tell when an elephant is sick. Dogs and cats get hot, dry noses; birds might start moulting. But an elephant is already kind of dry all over, and it doesn't have feathers to drop.

Asian mahouts often have entire manuals devoted to elephant care. Some manuals wax almost mystical about an elephant's form and feelings; others are rather no-nonsense, with an anything-but-mystical approach to elephant welfare.

In the no-nonsense category, I found a guide for elephant care written especially for mahouts, which includes the following symptoms for a sick elephant:
  • The elephant is listless, hardly moving its ears, trunk and tail.
  • The elephant seems exhausted, often resting its trunk on the ground for extended periods.
  • The elephant stands with its eyes closed and yawns frequently.
  • The elephant is agitated and sometimes bellows near the ground.
  • The elephant is agitated and tries to apply dirt to a wound.
  • The elephant's eyes are dull, sunken and appear to shed copious tears.
  • There is a mucous-like discharge from the elephant's trunk.
  • The elephant's skin is stiff to the touch and exceptionally dry.
  • The inside of the elephant's mouth and trunk, as well as its tongue, are either very pale, brownish, or bright red, rather than the usual pink.
  • The skin above the toenails is dry.  
So, what do you do if your elephant is sick? Oddly enough, many of the remedies for elephants are the same as those for humans.

If an elephant is in pain, you give it 40 to 60 aspirin, ibuprofen or paracetamol, either dissolved in water or ground up in a favourite food such as bananas.

If an elephant has a wound, you apply iodine, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic creams.

And if an elephant has muscular pain, anti-inflammatory ointments are rubbed into the skin. And rubbed into the skin. And rubbed into the skin again, because elephant skin absorbs ointments very quickly, requiring multiple applications.


A jabstick being used on an elephant's hind leg to give it
a much-needed injection of antibiotics.
Source: http://www.elephantcare.org/medtech.htm


Elephants are also prone to many injuries and illnesses never seen in humans, as well as sad conditions such as malnutrition, overwork and injuries due to harsh treatment—to say nothing of even worse man-made traumas such as landmine injuries, gunshot wounds and poison-by-poacher. Nor are elephants immune to snakebite, insect bites, and even illness from that industrial wastes that are often less regulated in the developing world.

As for the thermometer that I put in my little elephant's mouth? Although some mahouts can tell if an elephant has a fever just by the temperature of its breath, a thermometer is normally used to take an elephant's temperature. Just not in its mouth or ear.


Asian bull elephant.
Source: http://www.whalenation.org/asianelephantsproject.html

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Monday, 20 January 2014

Elephant No. 87: Elephantasies by Friedrich-Karl Waechter




Last week I came home to find a lovely little book in my mailbox from my friend Sylvie Morel. While browsing a bookstore in a nearby village, she came across the little volume and very kindly bought it for me. Not only is it a first edition, but it's in almost mint condition. Quite a nice find, if you ask me.


Front cover of Elephantasies by Friedrich-Karl Waechtner.
Published 1966 by Dennis Dobson, London, U.K.
©1966 Verlag Barmeier & Nikel, Frankfurt, Germany

Elephantasies is a strange but rather sweet little book filled with oddball drawings by the famed cartoonist. Not, I admit, that I'd ever heard of Friedrich-Karl Waechter myself, but my cartoon-o-phile friends will undoubtedly know right away who he is.


Friedrich-Karl Waechter around 2002.
Source: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/
buecher/neue-frankfurter-schule-koenig-friedrich-der-
zeichner-f-k-waechter-ist-tot-1252448-b1.html

Waechter was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) in 1937. Following the Second World War, his family settled in Germany, where Waechter attended the Lauenburg Scholar School. Teachers immediately noticed his artistic abilities, and upon graduation he moved to Hamburg to study graphic art.





In 1962, he took a job drawing cartoons for Die Zeit in Frankfurt. His work attracted the attention of the fledgling satirical magazine, Pardon, and Waechter was offered a job. While with Pardon, he co-founded the New Frankfurt School, a collective of eminent cartoonists and writers of comics.




By 1966, he was writing books. Elephantasies seems to have been his first. Published in London in January 1966, Elephantasies is perhaps the only of his books to appear concurrently in English and German. Not that there are many words in either language in the book.




Waechter married and became a father, and by 1970 was writing children's books. From the descriptions I've read, they sound like very fun books, inviting readers to complete puzzles and drawings, write on the pages, cut things up and generally participate in whatever was going on in the story.




At the same time, even his children's books tended to be slightly subversive. He produced titles such as Der Anti-Struwwwelpeter, which mocked the story on which the movie Edward Scissorhands is based. Then there was Die Reise: Eine schrecklich schöne Bildergeschichte ("The Journey: A Terribly Beautiful Picture History"), in which a young boy is taken on a trip by a trio of slightly sinister men who show up at his door one day.




In 1979, Waechter co-founded the satirical magazine, Titanic, which featured his cartoons regularly until 1992. In that year, he decided to change gears slightly, switching his focus to teaching, writing books, and writing and directing plays. In addition, he created unusual sculptures, including a gigantic caterpillar perched in a tree, and Pinkelbaum, or "Peeing Tree".


Big Caterpillar by F.K. Waechter.
Frankfurt, Germany
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Riederwald_pg_010.jpg


Waechter died of lung cancer in 2005, at the age of 67. Over his lifetime, he wrote some 40 books and more than a dozen plays, in addition to innumerable cartoons—most importantly, of course, a welter of elephants.





Elephant Lore of the Day
I was going to write about something else here today, but I decided instead that this piece of lore from the original Elephant a Day blog was a better fit.

The phrase "seeing pink elephants" refers to hallucinations caused by extreme drunkenness, and usually results from long-term alcoholism.

The first known use of the term comes courtesy of author Jack London, who in 1913's John Barleycorn describes "the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants."

A Wikipedia entry on pink elephants describes a story in Superman (Action Comics #7, December 1938), in which the Man of Steel lifts an elephant over his head at a circus. This causes a drunk in the audience to say, "I don't mind seeing pink elephants, but (-hic-) this is too much!" The same source also quotes Raymond Chandler's 1943 novel, Lady in the Lake, which refers to a doctor "who ran around all night with a case of loaded hypodermic needles, keeping the fast set from having pink elephants for breakfast."

And then there is the famous pink-elephant sequence in the 1941 Walt Disney film, Dumbo. Dumbo and his mouse friend Tim, having drunk water laced with champagne, hallucinate dancing and singing "pink elephants on parade". It's probably one of the most psychedelic sequences I've ever seen in a Disney film, outside of Fantasia.


A still from the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence in the Walt
Disney movie, Dumbo (1941).
Source: http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Pink_Elephants


Interestingly, hallucinations such as this are not the result of drunkenness itself, but are one of the symptoms of withdrawal. Alcoholic hallucinosis, or alcohol-related psychosis, develops twelve to twenty-four hours after drinking has ceased. It can involve both auditory and visual hallucinations, usually accusatory or threatening in nature. It comes on and goes away quickly—unlike its sister ailment, delirium tremens—and tends to occur in those with a history of long-term alcohol or drug abuse.



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Friday, 17 January 2014

Elephant No. 86: Guest Artist Neena Singhal




This was one of my favourite elephant gifts this Christmas, handmade for me by my sister Neena.

Neena is someone whose artistic precision I sincerely admire. She can quilt and cross-stitch and perform incredible feats of paper engineering—all things that make me completely crazy. I suppose I'm the flaky artist in the family, while she is the architect. In other words, she would build the Sistine Chapel; I would decorate it with fingerpainted elephants.

Just looking at how many cross-stitched elephants there are on here gives me hives. After making one, I'd have decided that was enough. I counted, and there are 11 elephants on here—including one that wraps around the side.




She's even made them purple, which is my favourite colour, but definitely not hers. And it's a bag, which, if you know me, is something I also like very much. I must be part cat, because I definitely gravitate towards interesting bags and boxes.

Each year, Neena gives family members a Christmas bag in addition to our other gifts, and they're often handcrafted. This is another recent production. She both made the bag and cross-stitched the Santa—which is really petit-point, because the entire central image is only 4.25 x 6.75 inches.
 





My version of a similar Christmas bag? Bought at the dollar store, and (sometimes) stuffed with a flourish of tissue paper.

Neena tells me that she finds cross-stitching relaxing. I find that it gives me a headache. So definitely kudos to Neena—both for her patience, and for making me one of the best handmade elephant gifts ever.







Elephant Lore of the Day
Since Neena made me a parade of purple elephants, I thought I'd update a piece of elephant lore I wrote a couple of years ago, about another parade of elephants.

One of the most interesting public art installations in recent years has been The Elephant Parade. Conceived in 2006, The Elephant Parade was inspired by Marc Spits's visit to the Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital in Thailand, the first of its kind in the world. Among other things, the hospital provides prosthetic legs for elephants who have stepped on landmines.

At the hospital, Spits met Mosha, a baby elephant who had lost her foot and had been fitted with a prosthetic leg. Moved to find a way of supporting efforts to save Asian elephants, Spits and his son Mike created The Elephant Parade, with all proceeds going to the Asian Elephant Foundation.


Little Mosha, the original inspiration for The Elephant Parade.
Source: http://www.elephantparade.com/index.php/about/how-it-all-began/


The first Elephant Parade appeared in Rotterdam in 2007, and has since been presented in major cities around the world. Each host city features at least 200 brightly coloured elephants, individually decorated by well-known artists, designers, companies and celebrities.

The life-sized baby elephants are placed in public areas, and are meant to draw attention to the plight of Asian elephants. To date, the organization has raised millions of dollars through merchandise sold online, as well as through auction of the decorated elephants.

Artists have included Diane von Furstenburg, Isaac Mizrahi, Katy Perry, and Ferrari. For more on The Elephant Parade, visit their website at www.elephantparade.com.


One of The Elephant Parade displays in London, England in 2010
Source: www.elephantparade.com



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Thursday, 16 January 2014

Elephant No. 85: Tea Cozy



This year's challenge in my fibre arts guild was tea cozies. Although I'm a tea drinker, I usually make it by the cup, so tea cozies are not really my thing. You have to admit, however, that a teapot does bear a certain resemblance to an elephant, so this particular challenge seemed tailor-made for me.

I was going to use a pattern for this, but the only elephant tea-cozy pattern I found wasn't quite what I wanted. So I decided to wing it. I'm not the kind of person who whips off fantastically clever knitted things without a pattern, but I figured I could probably manage some kind of rounded shape, a trunk, some ears and a tail.

I planned to "full" or felt the elephant components in my washing machine, so I needed yarn that was 100% wool and/or other animal fibre. I had some yarn from a stash exchange that looked like it might work. Unfortunately, it had no label, so I burned a bit to test it. According to a study I found online, if a fibre "flames up then snuffs itself out quickly, leaving a small, easily crushed bead of carbon," it's wool. Okey dokey, then.




I wanted a smallish elephant, so I chose the second-smallest teapot we have.




These were the pieces I knitted. I used large (7.5 mm) needles to make everything spacey enough to allow for shrinkage. I added a green party hat to the mix, as I wanted to end up with a party elephant.




I tossed everything into my top-loading washing machine, and ran it through a long cycle with hot water, a bit of laundry soap, and lots of agitation. Then I did it again. And again. And again. Actually, I lost count of how many cycles it took. I began to loathe this project.

Eventually I ended up with pieces I could live with. The yarn turned surprisingly fluffy and shed like a Persian cat, but there was no way I was going to knit everything again, so I made the best of it.




I stitched the grey parts together, then needlefelted a few details onto the elephant, including an eye, a black tip to the tail, some pink inside the ears, and the all-important pink toenails. (I know at least two people who will agree about the toenails.)









At this point, it looked to me a bit like a mutant mouse or a jerboa, but I didn't really see how the shape would accommodate something more elephant-like, so this was going to have to do.

Sadly, the green hat I'd knitted was far too big. I tried needlefelting it to make it smaller. That didn't work, so I cut it apart and tried to sew it back together, but it looked weird. So I decided to needlefelt a new one. I also needlefelted a little blue bird to perch on top.




In addition to a party hat, I needlefelted a party blowout. I was crazy enough to make this as a flat strip, then decorate it, roll it and add a mouthpiece.




Finally, I made a pair of balloons that I wired around the elephant's tail. I like to make my needlefelting things free of anything but wool, so the balloons needed to be a bit on the small side, or they'd droop on the wire. The size kind of bugged me—but not enough to start over with a piece of styrofoam on the inside.







I still think it looks like a mouse or some other kind of rodent, but I don't hate it. However, if I were ever to do this again (and we won't hold our breath), I would probably choose a different type of teapot, or a more conventional half-moon tea cozy shape.




Still, as an anti-tea-cozy tea cozy, this works for me. And in the end, it's kind of cute.







Elephant Lore of the Day
On March 24, 1939, an elephant was welcomed into the Robur Tea Room for a special tea party. Sadly, there are no details on what prompted the owners to invite an elephant to tea, nor has the name of the elephant been recorded for posterity.


Young elephant from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia entering the
Robur Tea Room for the Elephant's Tea Party, March 24, 1939.
Photo: Sam Hood
Collection of the State Library of NSW
Source: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemLarge.aspx?itemID=23304


After doing a bit of online research, however, I think this might be Sarina, who was somewhere between six and nine years old in 1939. According to a newspaper article printed that year, Sarina was about six and a half feet tall, which would make her just about the right size to fit through the tearoom door. Her fellow elephants at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney—Jumbo, Jessie and the famous Queenie—were all much older and larger at the time.


Young elephant enjoying a large cup of tea, Robur Tea Room,
Sydney Australia—March 24, 1939.
Photo: Sam Hood
Collection of the State Library of NSW
Source: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemLarge.aspx?itemID=23311


If this is indeed Sarina, she is arrived at the Taronga Zoo in either 1936 or 1938, and is thought to have been born on the island of Singapore. Caught in the wild, she was apparently sent to Thailand (then known as Siam), later ending up at the Taronga Zoo. She died in 1971 of unrecorded causes.


Young elephant at the Robur Tea Room, Sydney, Australia—March 24, 1939.
Photo: Sam Hood
Collection of the State Library of NSW
Source: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemLarge.aspx?itemID=75203





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Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Elephant No. 84: Feature Artist Lindsay Pichaske


Detail from Pecking Order by Lindsay Pichaske, 2011.
Low-fire ceramic, sunflower seeds, beet dye and acrylic paint.
Photo: Lindsay Pichaske
Source: http://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/intimate-knowledge
 

I originally came across Lindsay Pichaske's work a couple of months back. On first glance, I was taken with the forms and how beautifully she evokes the animals she creates. Then I looked a little closer, and was astonished at the intricacy of both technique and materials.

Generally starting with a realistic ceramic animal form, she applies tens of thousands of labour-intensive materials such as glass beads, sunflower seeds, fibres, sequins and silk flower petals. While you'd think that would result in some sort of kitschy novelty work, Lindsay Pichaske's pieces are all stunningly beautiful, and rather haunting in their depictions of the animals she chooses.


Detail from The Long Thaw by Lindsay Pichaske, 2013.
Low-fired ceramic, hand-dyed artificial flower petals, paint and resin.
Photo: Sean Scheidt
Source: http://blog.nceca.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Long-Thaw-detail.jpg


On her website, Pichaske writes of her work:
What separates human from animal? What borders exist between real and imagined, beautiful and repugnant, animate and inanimate? 

Through the act of making, I swim in and around these margins, exploring how slippery the answers to these questions are. I create animals that blur boundaries. They challenge the perceived order and comfortable classifications of life. These animals are tricksters; familiar but also alien, seductive but also scary, animal but also human, alive but also dead. In a world where petals mimic fur and hair impersonates bone, even materials upset their expected roles.


Where You End and I Begin by Lindsay Pichaske, 2012
Low-fired ceramic and rooster feathers.
Photo: Robert MacInnis
Source: http://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/intimate-knowledge#


When asked in a recent interview how she chooses materials for the "skin" of an animal, she said:
For some pieces, I know exactly what I will use. For others I have to do a bit of experimenting and exploring. I usually start with a notion of the texture and color I want for that particular creature. From there I collect tons of different materials and test them out to see how they will arrange themselves across the surface. The material has to undergo some sort of transformation and become something more beautiful and interesting to me as it multiplies on the surface. I have to fall in love with it and be able to learn from it, otherwise I will not be interested enough to spend so much time with it.
To see more of Lindsay Pichaske's work, click here.


Pecking Order by Lindsay Pichaske, 2011.
Low-fire ceramic, sunflower seeds, beet dye and acrylic paint.
The sections dyed red indicate vulnerable areas on an elephant.
Photo: Lindsay Pichaske
Source: http://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/intimate-knowledge


Elephant Lore of the Day
While contemplating the intricacy of Lindsay Pichaske's work, it occurred to me—surprisingly, for the first time ever—that I had no idea how many muscles there are in an elephant's body.

The answer is interesting. Although the elephant's body has 394 skeletal muscles, the trunk on its own is estimated to have up to 40,000 individual muscles, divided into 100,000–150,000 individual units. Not only that, but these muscles are oriented every which-way, making the trunk highly manoeuvrable in any direction.

By contrast, the number of muscles in a house cat is 517—an astonishing 60 of which are in their ears—while a human adult has just 639.


The closest thing to an elephant's trunk—but with way fewer individual units:
the Festo Bionic Handling Assistant, which won the German Future Award in 2010.
Source: http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9655.htm



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