#67 Elephant Family

This is a story about a painting of elephants that actually started with my wife, she’s a class teacher in the Waldorf School and she teaches subjects like flowers, horticulture, animals and all kinds of things and every year at the beginning of the school year she asked me to paint a painting. She did botany and Chasm is a painting artist so this time I painted Emile Nola’s painting “The Big Garden”. She wanted to paint animals and she chose the animal and the elephant so I said okay and then I decided to figure out what size I should make the animal so if she wanted an elephant she wanted elephants so should it be our mother elephant with a female with a baby or a big group of, you know, you’ve heard of elephants or a bull should it be the jungle in the savannah I wasn’t quite sure what it should do so after talking to her we looked at paintings I started sketching I ordered a big frame and then what happened. I decided to design it so I chose a bull and his wife, a cow elephant and a baby and then a big “unto” to get it in proportion and to get this here like this to the left of the right little group so I decided she wanted a male, a female and a child, a baby elephant and then I chose the colors, more savannah than jungle and air to find a brushwork to use the brush to make it look very alive but also like an animal, say an elephant, the skin is very thick and leathery so I had to find some kind of tool for the brushwork and how should I use the colors, scrub them dry, all kinds of ideas came up and I decided to do some kind of layering with dry, very dry brushes and wipe them away and then with the sponge and the cloth and everything and I’ll show you the picture later and then yeah, the design was okay. It was interesting to the eye, you know, and then it kind of evolved and she helped and made her suggestions and comments and I responded to them and in the end it was done. It was a big picture, I’m not quite sure if it was 20 to 20 feet or even less. I’ll tell you the sizes later. This picture hung in the classroom. It was sixth grade at the World of School in Florida.