"The Runway Boy"
17 x 34" Acrylic on Board, 2008
Bull Moose
$7,500
This painting is available through the AFC Annual Show The Art of Conservation. Please visit the News & Events Page for more information or to contact the venue.
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The first several times I visited Wyoming or Colorado, usually for one artist workshop or another, I had the uncanny ability to miss every possible moose sighting. With some regularity a friend would say at breakfast, "Hey, did you see the moose?" Thereafter would follow the typical story of a moose sighting right outside someone’s cabin door at six thirty in the morning or wondering by a pond on a morning walk. Eager to see one of these animals myself, I would get up early the next morning and spend several fruitless hours shivering in the cold with not a moose in sight. Finally, on a trip to Jackson Hole in 2007, I got a clear view of a moose lumbering along in a dry ravine near Gros Ventre. I was fascinated by the contrast between the moose’s bulky body and its long, sinuous legs. The way the moose moved, steadily, powerfully, but with an unexpected gracefulness and fluidity, reminded me of male fashion models on a catwalk, hence the title "The Runway Boy." So enthralling was this sense of motion that I couldn’t choose what pose to paint. The solution was, of course, to pick two poses. By cutting one pose in half, entering on the left and exiting on the right, and positioning another stance in the middle to create a triptych, I wanted to suggest continual motion much like a zoetrope or the famous animal locomotion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. The highly detailed central animal contrasts with the more stylistically painted moose on the wings; conversely, the stony ground on the left and right is painted in sharp hyperrealsitc detail, while much of the ground surface around the central moose is gestural and stylized. This inversion is meant to heighten the sense of movement and shifting perspective as the animal passing through our field of vision.
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