Pangolin

This piece started with a comment from a friend who mentioned I should next draw a pangolin. That led to looking at photos of pangolins, which was depressing because these gentle and amazingly odd animals are being hunted into extinction, regardless of national protections, because they are considered an important ingredient in Chinese traditional medicine. Poachers take them for their meat and for their scales. So the pangolin is going the way of tigers (their paws) sharks (their fins) and rhinos (their horns), into the Asian black market.

There are opportunities online to help support the preservation of pangolins. They were easy to find. I encourage you to contribute a little.

There are several different species of pangolins. I downloaded dozens of photos of them and studied them for several evenings. Then this composition took shape, starting with the tracing of a plate…

This is mostly an African black bellied pangolin, though the shape of its scales and roundness of the body are more like some of the larger species. The black bellied pangolin’s dark underside and beautiful scales of black and gold inspired the night and day background for this drawing.

Usually my paintings and drawings, if they take more than a day or so to complete, get loud in my head, like buzzing. I can find it difficult to concentrate on conversations when I’m in the groove on a painting and I stop for a meal or something else during a weekend day. Usually they just talk to me when I’m at home. This one was different. This is completely drawn, not painted, and there were tens of thousands of pencil strokes and over twenty hours of work involved spread over the entire week. First, I had never drawn our moon’s portrait this large before, and that was a surprisingly moving experience. Then pangolin would sometimes call me all the way at work, or in the car while commuting this week. No words - just a tug. I drew for hours at a time, until my hands hurt too much to continue. Then I would walk away and immediately want to come back and do just one more scale, or one more square inch of sky… I was both delighted and sad to finish today.

23.5 x 17 inches - Pen, Prismacolor, Verithin, and Faber Castel pencils on Borden and Riley drawing paper.