Matamua Arts Photo Blog

Elephants on the Edge II is the second installment in a planned series showing Elephants gathering at the edge of a cliff. (Yes, I’m aware that I am perhaps not the most creative artist when it comes to naming my own artwork). I know its hard to see in this small picture, but there are three elephants here. One at the vary edge of the cliff, one coming up from behind, and another way in the back coming around the bend.

In the first installment (you can see it here), the emphasis settled on showing that the elephants were being driven from their natural habitat (by man). However, the real underlying point for me with this series has become that the elephants are choosing to commit suicide. With this second installment, I wanted to make that more clear.

As for the design of the picture, I knew I wanted the frame to be dominated by a shear rock face, with just a touch of color and activity near the top. I decided to go with palm trees to lend a sort of tropical paradise feel, and to better suggest that the elephants were being kicked out of paradise.

I decided that nowhere in these pictures will you actually see an elephant leaping to its death. I feel its important that this series function first and foremost as a collection of ‘interesting and pretty elephant pictures’, and not depress people outright.

…but between you, me and the light post over there, that’s what’s happening.

You can purchase a print here.

See all my artwork here.

Elephants on the Edge: a series of pictures all depicting elephants standing on the edge of various cliffs. The image below is the first in this proposed series, entitled simply Elephants on the Edge.

All the pictures in this series will look different from each other, with the exception that they will all share similar themes. In the case of this first piece, I wanted to make it clear that the elephants have been driven far from their natural habitat.

I think the cliff face in this picture represents the ends of the earth, in the literal sense—as in sailors of old sailing to the ends of the earth. The elephants come to this place because they are being driven out of their normal habitat. There simply is no where else they can go.

So, here they stand on a precipice.

The subtle (or maybe not so subtle) suggestion here is that the entire species stands on the brink of something catastrophic happening, with the time to act being now.

Like so many of my scenes, Elephants on the Edge began with just a flash of imagery in my head. I had a vision of Elephants standing on a cliff face, and nothing else. I thought it would make a good picture so I pursued it, without knowing what it meant. And that’s par for the course for me …that is to say, the meaning behind the image often never becomes clear to me as I’m working on my art. And that’s okay, because ‘true meaning’ should lie with the viewer, not me. My job is simply to bring the images in my head to life.

However, the meaning of this image did become clear to me, just as soon as I began working on it. I knew the elephants were coming to this place to commit suicide. If that’s not so evident in this first installment, it will be in the next…

You can purchase this print here.

See all my artwork here.

Matamua Arts turns 40 today …the Artist mind-you, not the company. Last night I sat outside on my front porch at roughly ten to midnight with my two cats—my lady sleeping soundly in the bedroom—and together we contemplated the last passing minutes of my thirties. Okay maybe it was just me.

Funny, all those thirty-something B-days gone by and I never much cared about my age. Funny, because now I care, maybe not so much about the fact of turning 40, but about all those thirty-something B-days gone forever. No more left; discontinued by the manufacturer. And to think quite a few of them passed without any fanfare at all—by decree. I mean, I flat out refused to make a big deal of it. No presents. No cake. I was going to be thirty-six forever! I remember declaring this to the world. Why 36 and not 35 or 34, I don’t know. It’s not like I didn’t feel the same at 34. No matter. With all this grey hair in my beard, I’d have a difficult time passing for 36 now anyway, much less 35 or 34.

As I sat out there under the stars with time running out, I decided I would spend the last few seconds of my thirties trying to remember what I was doing on this night ten years earlier. I drew a blank. Oh, the larger details came to mind, like where I was living and where I was working. But curiously, no lasting memory of what I was doing the night my twenties left me.

Why it should be so important now and not then, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s because going from twenty-nine to thirty is not nearly as significant as going from thirty-nine to forty. No doubt on this night, ten years ago, I still felt like I had my whole life ahead of me; still felt like I was going to live forever—like I was indestructible!

Here at the forty-year mark, however, things are a bit more in focus and a bit more realistic, and decidedly less indestructible. I still feel like I have my whole life in front of me. No, that’s not it. Maybe it’s that I have the whole rest of my life in front of me. Yea, that’s it. Except this time around there are no tickertape parades, no confetti falling from the sky. This time around the mood is decidedly more maudlin. My thirties are gone; tomorrow, first day of the downward slide.

Or maybe that’s just how I feel now, now as the thirties-clock is about to wind down. Maybe in a day or two I’ll go back to feeling like I did when I was 36. Oh, to be 36 again. To be 30 ANYTHING, again. …Actually, if the truth be known, I’d settle for 39. That was an awfully good vintage.

Well, at least when I’m fifty I’ll have no problem remembering what I was doing when I turned forty. Thanks to this blog entry it’s documented for all time: I was sitting on my front porch with my two cats writing about what it must have been like to be thirty.

Getting back to sitting on the porch…

I purposely sat out there without a watch. I was going to pay close attention instead for the slightest physiological changes in my body to alert me to the changeover. Nothing happened though. No dizziness or nausea, all systems normal. When I peaked back inside at the clock I saw that I had already been 40 for a good two minutes.

It was quite painless.