"Silverbacks" by Jeff White

Image used with the permission of the artist. Jeff White is a publisher and project facilitator at Totemic17. Check out his website to learn more, and fellow printmakers check out this Open Call for Artists.

I am not big into celebrating Valentines Day or Presidents Day, but I do enjoy celebrating another holiday that happens every February 12: Darwin Day.

In college I first saw the satirical cartoons from naysayers of the Theory of Evolution, depicting Charles Darwin as an ape. (See below.) I remember thinking, Why is this an insult? Apes are beautiful, intelligent creatures. At the time I was still ignorant to how apes had been largely regarded by those in Western civilization as exhibiting all that is disgraceful about humankind.

Looking at apes as a kid, I thought it was obvious from appearances that we're closely related. I have an encounter burned into my memory of a gorilla at a zoo placing his hand on the glass enclosure that separated us, and being utterly struck by the similarities between his hand and mine.

My graduating exhibition at Ohio State University was titled "In Search of Ourselves." My major had been fine art, but I minored in physical anthropology and was fascinated by human evolution. Many of my paintings and prints at the time depicted great apes in a manner similar to this woodcut by Jeff White. In other words, images that sought to get across the emotional and social complexity of our closest cousins. I revisited this concept more recently with the first entry in Cats A-Z: All Ball.

In our correspondence, Jeff mentioned, "I don't know that I'd ever choose a kozo with mango leaf inclusions for anything else but I liked it with these gorillas!" I like it, too. There's something about how the leaves obscure and interrupt parts of the image of these two holding each other close. The scene is is already closely cropped, giving us only this moment of intimacy and affection, and even that seems to disintegrate a bit along the edges in a bustle of gouges and grain.

I feel something important, but not well-enough understood, is slipping away right before my eyes.

Cats A-Z: A (All Ball)

Woodcut
Image is 3.5" x 4"

This is page one of an alphabet book of cats I'm writing and illustrating. Each page will feature a cat whose name starts with a letter of the alphabet. Haven't decided if the final book will be in color or keep it in black and white. I'm planning to play around with watercolors on my proofs of this print tomorrow.

All Ball 

Being adopted, he looks nothing like his mother. But when she holds him, he feels comforted by her fur and the heat of her body against his. He can tell from her long gazes and gentle caresses that she loves him. Even when a baby is chosen from a litter, a mother knows which one is hers.

All Ball was the name of Koko the gorilla's first pet kitten. Koko (a gorilla in captivity who was taught more than 1000 words in sign language) chose this pet out of an abandoned litter and named him "All Ball" because the kitten was a Manx and therefore had no tail. There are many films and a book documenting Koko playing joyfully with All Ball. Sadly, All Ball was killed in an accident just a few months after being adopted by Koko. After hearing the news, Koko is reported to have signed words expressing her grief and cried in private. It is a moving story that some researchers present as evidence of the profound emotional similarities between humans and other great apes.  

"Gorilla and Baby Goat"

8" x 10" (image) 9" x 12.5" (paper)

3 layer reduction

Oil based ink on Kozo paper

Available for purchase here.

I have the image of a hand burned into my memory. A large, black, hand pressed up against a glass enclosure. Walking down the narrow, dirt path toward the next primate exhibit, the hoots of gibbons in my ears, I looked up and saw a hand so human that it gave me a startle when I next saw the hairy, beastly, body attached.

The gentle hands of Koko the gorilla many times caressed her pet kittens, caring for them as if they were own gorilla offspring. Koko's trainer reported that when the first of her kittens, "All Ball", was killed and Koko learned the news, she made sounds as close to human weeping as perhaps a gorilla can come.

I have the sound of voices burned into my memory. A duet of childlike cries. Rubbing out prints as a guest artist-in-residence in rural Kentucky, the silhouettes of dying sunflowers in my peripheral vision, I jumped when the baby goats who lived beneath my barn-studio cried out for their mother: "Maaaa".