Winter Watercolours III
January 14, 2022
It seems to be just a very human thing to anthropomorphize whatever we come across–give everything from fish to insects to birds to apes to dinosaurs to pets a human personality. We even do it with cars and ships. Growing up, I was read the Thornton Burgess stories, like “The Adventures of Grandfather Frog” and the adventures of “Sammy Jay”. You may, rather, have been read “Winnie The Pooh” or “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”. Every animal in them was cast in human likeness.
And then came along the biggest anthropomorphiser of all time, Walt Disney:
There’s a downside to creating animals in our own image–they don’t get to be entities on their own terms, self-definers of their unique life force and world and surroundings. One filmmaker who decided to take it to extremes was Alfred Hitchcock, whose film ‘The Birds‘ cast them as human haters who couldn’t wait to swoop down and become feathered masters over anyone walking around on two legs. Seeing all those crows on telephone wires, silently waiting for the signal to begin wreaking destruction was the very definition of creepy.
All these ravens want in this painting is whatever can be gleaned from a long-before harvested crop of corn:
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weisserwatercolours 
….your poems bring with them something more, something beyond
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Beautiful painting. I liked your summing up of our responses to humanise all animals, how foolish we are, how magnificent they are
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I do feel that way with movies and books many times. I want to keep my own idea of it.
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You’re welcome — and thank you for your kind words. They mean a lot to me.
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….thank you for your support and appreciative critique–when I learned to read on my own, I didn’t want books with illustrations because they messed with the pictures I had in my head of what everyone/everything looked like, hahaha.
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….I enjoy your site so much, Kaya–thank you for your encouraging words today, Lance
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….thank you, Laureen, for taking time to point me towards Ernst Kreidolf and his rather amazing interpretation of nature–wow–such a richly artistic interior world within him, eh? You paint with such a freedom of expression and movement. Thank you for your supportive comment on mine!
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Are you familiar with the works of Ernst Kreidolf? He was a Swiss painter (1863-1956) that anthropomorphized plants, and animals — especially insects. I love your interpretation of ravens.
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Ravens… How animated, how alive they are in the first painting.
And the second painting is enchanting and a little bit surreal.
I love these paintings very, very much!
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I don’t like the cartoonish ones either. And I really like how you create space in your landscape with the large white area. (K)
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….so kind, thank you, Lynn.
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I prefer your interpretation of ravens – poetic and thoughtful.
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ditto (I left out a ‘t’)
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…dito, Tom.
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Jiminy Cricket… One if the best examples… Brains, heart and soul…
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