Elephants and Art

We have no elephants in either Point Roberts or Roberts Creek. Just as well, perhaps, as they are hard on trees and we have a lot of trees for them to be hard on. But they are such unusual animals. Emotional, communicative, communitarian, intelligent, maybe even thoughtful. And such good memories, of course.

Elephants are on my mind for two reasons. First, I got an email message providing me with a link to elephants painting elephants. In order to do this, however, they need training. And second, because the Richmond, B.C., Art Gallery suggested I send them a set of 9 ATC’s for an exhibit on the theme of ‘Life as Art.’

ATC stands for ‘artist trading cards.’ Like baseball trading cards, they are 2.5x3.5 inches, stored in plastic sleeves, and are traded. Unlike baseball trading cards, they are each original art and are never sold, only traded. At least, that’s the basic idea. Started about a decade ago in Switzerland, the practice of trading ATC’s quickly spread to North America, and now throughout the world via the internet where many trading groups exist. (You trade the actual card by mail, but you make the trading deal via pictures on the net.) The kicker to it all is that there is no required media for the card: if you can get it on a 2.5”x3.5” card and put it into a plastic trading card sleeve, the method is up to you. I’ve seen them made of plants, plastic, fabric, sand, beads, and metal, as well as painted with acrylics, watercolors, oil paints, collaged with anything that can be flattened, and drawn. In my reasonably large collection, there are cards made by old people, by little kids, by professional artists, and by untalented amateurs. And all the in betweens.

So, I’m thinking elephants for ‘life as art’ because elephants' lives are surely artful when they’re allowed to have their lives and when they’re not destroying trees. Furthermore, elephants have wonderfully broad sides which could be used directly as a canvas or covered with a canvas. Thus have I set myself to making a crowd of elephants whose life is art. Like the elephants who, with training, have learned to paint elephants, I have learned, with training, to ‘paint’ elephants with bits of thread and fabric. Now completed, they go on to the Richmond Art Gallery, and after the September-November exhibit, they will be traded one at a time for something that other people have been thinking about these days and have also sent to the exhibit. And then they will live in their plastic sleeves in my collected ATC books.

So strange, elephants. Because we don’t have them in North America, we don’t know that much about them. Circus animals, largely, even if where we see them is zoos. I know four wonderful books about elephants: White Bone by Barbara Gowdy; Silent Thunder by Katy Payne, Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss, and The Cowboy and His Elephant by Malcolm McPherson. The first is a novel in which the main characters are all elephants. The second and third are accounts by women whose research interests took them to Africa to study elephants. The last, the story of a man in Colorado (the man who was the photo model for the original Marlboro Man) who came into having an elephant of his own. Definitely not circus elephants.