These paintings are part of the Tall tales series. I got really into American folklore and the ways it has been incorporated into our history. Tall tales are fictional (think Paul Bunyun) but frequently there is a blurred line between truth and reality. Many of the stories we grew up hearing about George Washington are invented, the cutting of his fathers prized cherry tree for example. These paintings are all of American animals painted in the style of early naturalists like Audubon who were trying to record the animals for identification. They needed to be real enough that you could use them for reference. Even Audubon was known to use artistic license in his scientific illustrations (he added mountains to one of the prints in The Birds of Florida for example). What happens to a historical or scientific record when we've added in a dash of legend?

My animals are all in scenarios that seem almost real but are fantastical or anomalous. They are experiencing strange weather or celestial events. The crab is witness to a halo around the sun in an eclipse. Or is it the opening of a black hole in the sky? I like to think of the animals alone witnessing strange weather events or tears in the fabric of reality. Sailors have always had little rhymes and proverbs for predicting the weather, "Mare's tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails" is an old sailor saying about the cloud formations that predicted rough seas. My animals are silent witnesses of the strange and sublime.