If I could talk with the animals

 Last winter I made my first drawing trip to the zoo, new sketchbook and membership card in hand. But it’d been years since I’d done anything artistic and my expectations weren’t high.

One of my first stops that day was the gorillas. While I stood there, one of the apes walked over, turned his back, and took a dump right in front of me. He then scooped it up, sniffed it, and...do you know where this is going?  He ate it. Not just ate it—savored it, in small bites, like he was enjoying the robust flavor.

I wondered about his behavior—was it typical for a gorilla? A sign of boredom? Of a nutrient deficiency? Chuckling to myself, I did a quick sketch and walked on.

A few minutes later I found myself in front of the giraffes. Within moments, one of them started pissing. Another saw it, leaned in, and began lapping away at the falling yellow stream. While one bit of animal weirdness hadn’t bothered me, two gave me the giggles.

From there I headed to the meerkats, hoping for less titillating experience. But this wasn’t meant to be, because in the next display two large parrots were nothing but a flapping, squawking union of bird sex. I was drawn to them, like being compelled to look at a car crash as you drove by, and spent the next 20 minutes watching them do the ornithological bop before I gave up and decided to be happy with my one half-assed, gorilla-eating-poo sketch.

As I walked home I tried to make sense of all this, wondering what the animals—the universe? God? the zoological spirits? —had been trying to tell me.  Regardless, I knew I was excited to come back.

Following zoo visits showed that this type of debauchery was far rarer then my initial experience suggested. Nonetheless, I quickly became addicted to drawing the animals. I found a kind of wonder in the experience that touched the little boy in me who had a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine and beat up the kid down the street for killing rabbits.

This feeling of wonder has been furthered by the unexpected reactions the animals have had to my sitting and sketching for hours—the one still face in a constantly-flowing stream of passers-by. Some get skittish, as if spotting a predator, like the time I sent a troupe of giraffes galloping away with a sneeze. Others, like the orangutans, seem to think I’m a zookeeper bringing food and start tapping on the glass.

Better are the animals who don’t like me or think I might be prey. The king cobra slid over scary as hell and totally bad-ass, splayed across its habitat like it was daring me to step on it. The komodo dragon was similarly bold, deliberately coming over and putting its face right in front of mine, poisonous saliva lathering on its lips. Or the jaguar, whose eyes locked onto mine from a raised perch and clearly told me how different our relationship would be in another time and place.

By far, the best moment so far has been when a young lioness took notice of me squatting down to get an eye-level view. She zoned in on me, did the butt-in-the-air pouncy thing, then closed the 20’ gap between us in a heartbeat and tried to swipe at my head through the glass. Then she started jumping around like a playful cat, so I acted the cat toy and for the next few minutes we danced and played peek-a-boo around a pillar.

The feeling of wonder these connections provide is has been at least as important in keeping me coming back as my desire make art. Truly inspiring in the most literal sense of the word.

More of my drawings done at the Woodland Park Zoo can be found at my flickr page.

100+ year old sewing table refinish

Some of my earliest memories are of playing with my grandmother’s old treadle sewing machine. The smooth interplay of the gears fascinated me and I loved how a slight change in pressure would reverse their direction.

This small fascination has stayed with me over time. But, beyond the mechanisms, old sewing tables never really appealed to me as pieces of furniture— the ubiquitous stacked drawers always make them feel bulky and their decorative metal frames often seem fussy.

This is why I was so drawn to the simple lines of this treadle sewing machine’s frame when I saw it for sale at a nearby Salvation Army. Much of the piece was in disrepair—laminate peeling off the drawers, panels hanging together by just a few screws, filth gunking up the machine, treadle gears rusted in places. However, the table top was in great shape and had a lovely glow, as did the table’s $50 price tag.

Online research provided proper geekery: the piece is a Wheeler & Wilson No. 9, made sometime between 1897-1905 in Bridgeport, CT. It was advertised as “The only perfect sewing machine for family use.” After the company was bought by Singer, these same machines continued to be built under that brand for another decade.

The restoration has actually gone much better then I’d hoped. The machine is now in running shape and looks beautiful. The wooden body is solid and has a warm finish that better matches the table top. The best improvement has been the removal of the drawers, which gives the table a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright feel.

The end result is pretty sweet for $50: a 100 year old table made from warm, aged wood and metal that also manages to have a very slick, modern feel...and just happens to be a fully functional sewing machine. Thrift store gold.

More pictures of this sewing machine can be found on my flickr page.

$4 cat heaven

I’m here to talk about a hard truth we, as a nation, need to address: cat furniture is horrendous and needs to be stopped.

Let’s be honest, you will never hear someone say “that beige shag cat tree really brings the room together.” And who decided that the appropriate material for cat trees was beige shag carpeting anyway? Does anybody really like this stuff? Anybody?

I’m half-convinced the real reason for this material choice is a vast conspiracy between the carpet industry and pet retailers to empty stockpiles of the stuff that’s filled a New Jersey storage space since the eighties. And while there may be more artistic options available, I’m not going to spend $500-$2000 on an object whose primary functions are to be shredded and shed upon.

A big part of my resistance has been that I’ve refinished or built most of the furniture in my house and am unwilling to throw off all that loveliness with a carpeted jungle gym, so my kitties have suffered (yeah, right) in the name of aesthetics. This changed last Wednesday when I found this neat school desk selling at my local Goodwill for $4.

Initially I wasn’t very interested, but the $4 price tag held me long enough for a voice in my head to say “scratching post.” From there, things moved quickly. Full disclosure: by the time everything was added up—the chair, sisal, cat toys, fleece, jute, assorted hardware— total cost came to around $50

I have to say, the finished product is cuuute, and the cats adore it. They pretty much claimed ownership five seconds after I wrapped the chair back with sisal and love sleeping double-decker on the fleece pads now that winter is here.