I seem to be a rare breed: I’m not an animal lover. I have nothing against animals, but I have no interest in owning a dog or cat, or being a “pet parent,” as a vet told me is now a common phrase. The closest I come to being an animal lover is supporting the Humboldt Spay and Neuter Clinic. So it’s odd that for the last six months I’ve been painting watercolors of animals.
During the last three years, I’ve created art about everything but animals — landscapes, trees, abstract shapes, people and faces (the most challenging). Thanks to the “studio” my husband, Barry, designed for me as a birthday present — a sheet of plywood at right angles to my desk — I finally developed a consistent painting practice. A dedicated space makes all the difference. No longer do I have to put my supplies away and get them out every time I paint. I’m able to make a “big mess,” as my friend in Mendocino, a professional artist, calls it. It’s an ideal setup because I can write articles on my laptop in one direction, then swivel over to my art table and paint.
As far as formal artistic training goes, I took one watercolor class 40 years ago. None of the techniques I learned stuck, which is OK with me right now, because my goal is to build the habit and have fun. I’ll focus on artistic skills like developing perspective down the road. Instead, I copy shamelessly. Like painters throughout the ages who imitated the masters, I follow artists I admire. As I study, copy and adapt, my own style has emerged. For me, it’s all about rich, deep, saturated color. As one of my mentors puts it, “Color is my candy.”
I started painting animals in January after watching a YouTube video by an artist named Brendan Schaefer, who decided to paint owls everyday for a month. If he could do that for a whole 31 days, I thought, surely, I could focus on one animal for a week. I chose pigeons because they’re maligned as “flying rats.” Besides, their iridescent plumage mesmerizes me. I took photos of several and painted three the first week.
From pigeons, I kept my “animal a week” project going, moving on to turtles. Since few of these animals are available locally to photograph, my strategy is to Google, say, “Turtle Abstract Art,” where I’ll find all sorts of colorful, often whimsical, images. Since then, I’ve painted horses, elephants, giraffes, raptors, owls, frogs, raccoons and llamas. I am working on a goat. While I haven’t devoted a whole painting to a cat, one does occasionally show up in a corner of the page because I’m a sucker for Facebook “likes” and people love cats.
After pigeons, why did I keep painting animals, since I’m not especially animal-friendly? While gazing into the eyes of the raccoon I was painting recently, I realized I’ve been unconsciously focusing on animals as a refuge from our painfully contentious human world. It gives me the opportunity to lose myself in another universe. I’m reminded of a time in the early ’90s when I went to Sonoma to lead a business seminar, arriving a day ahead around noon. After lunch, as I wandered around town, worrying about the seminar, I wondered why I had bothered to come a day early. I called Barry and asked his advice. “I think you need to get out of this century,” he said. “Go visit the Sonoma mission.” It turned out the mission, the most northerly and last of 21 to be built, was founded in 1823, so my exploration of the history and the architecture gave me more than a 150-year buffer from the ’90s. It was good advice. For the entire afternoon, I stayed a far remove from my anxieties about the seminar.
When painting an animal, it’s exactly the same. I take a long, restorative break not from our century, but from our species. Instead of ruminating about tariffs or deportations, I paint away, staring deep into the limbs or the neck or the wings of the creature I’m creating, grateful to have a pleasurable, calm outlet when “the world is too much with me.”
For me, painting is not a form of meditation, because decisions still need to be made (“Which shade of blue shall I use here?”). But problems on the page feel much more tangible and concrete than those in our troubled world — and the stakes, of course, are nowhere near as high.
Animals are not separate from politics, of course. But the longer I paint an animal, the more remote the world feels. As I immerse myself in the creature, I feel a kinship with them. Sometimes I even fall in love, as I did with the raccoon.
Maybe I’m becoming an animal lover, after all.
Louisa Rogers (she/her) is a writer, painter and paddleboarder who lives in Eureka and Guanajuato, Mexico.
