There has been a recurring motif in my work this year, and I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on this: The Wolf. It was wholly unintentional, but the wolf has been popping up in my work all year long. It first started at the beginning of the year, when I made my painting, Daphne’s Metamorphosis.
The myth that this painting is based on is the story of Apollo and Daphne. In researching the stories that I use in my Of Myth and Men series, I’ve been looking a lot at the animals that are either associated directly with the gods depicted in my paintings or symbolically associated with certain characteristics of these gods. While I was reading up on Apollo, I found he had several sacred animals, and the wolf was one of them (he’s sometimes referred to as the Wolf God), and also perhaps most fitting especially in relation to the specific myth of Daphne. To me, he was more or less a dog barking up the wrong tree.
But the howling wolf imagery also reminded me of the wolf cartoon by Tex Avery from the old MGM/Looney Toons cartoons that I watched when I was younger. As a child, I had a book on animation that had images of the Wolf and Red Hot Riding Hood, and funnily enough, the story of Red Riding Hood would eventually come up later on in my work.
From Daphne’s Metamorphosis, the wolf’s silhouette lent itself well to my works The Painted Lovers and The Dance. In both of these, again, the idea of the male wolf as a hunter and predator is referenced. The wolf itself is an animal that shows up in many different cultures’ myths and legends, so I found it interesting how it held both positive, negative, and often completely opposite connotations. There are also many metaphors involving the wolf, which are still commonly used. And oddly enough, the topic of spirit animals and the wolf has come up in several conversations this year with fellow artists.
At first I though perhaps the wolf thing was maybe just something I was working on in this group of work, which I produced on a residency in Banff in January and February. I didn’t really think that I would use the image of the wolf again, but then I received a commission, which I am currently working on, to paint a portrait that had an arctic wolf in it. Coincidence? Perhaps.
While preparing for my residency at Ox-Bow this September, I had the idea for a self-portrait, and it just to happened to involve a wolf. And here is where the story of Little Red Riding Hood started to creep into my work.
I don’t think my work has ever really touched on fairy tales before. While I was developing the piece, I didn’t actually think of it was being related to the fairy tale, but as I worked further along and stumbled across some reference material while I was at Ox-Bow, it became clear that this painting was playing with a lot of the same ideas that are often related to the story of Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.
Through reading up a bit about the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the meanings that have often been read into it, I was interested in the underlying sexual themes and metaphors in this children’s tale. And so, the story subtly crept into my painting, mainly through suggestion in the title of the piece, To Break Free (Without the Hunter).
The last piece involving The Wolf, which I worked on at Ox-Bow, came about through finding a fabric with a wolf pattern all over it. Honestly, I was both intrigued and appalled by the tackiness of the pattern, but it led me to create this digital piece, made from scanning the fabric and overlaying text:
I’m actually really excited because creating this piece on a whim has led me onto a new path with some work that I’m currently developing for next year.
So at the moment, there are no plans yet to feature any more wolves in my work, but who knows…I may revisit The Wolf in the future.
And now I’ll leave you with two songs, one of which I was listening to while working on some of these wolf pieces at Ox-Bow, and the other that I found after I got back to Vancouver. A call and answer. Even bad wolves can be good. Enjoy: