This is another watercolor and ink. It has been interesting to try and develop a second style of painting. I think trying to strip things down has been good for me and encouraged more bold color use. They seem to have a nice energy about them and, at least to my eye, don’t seem “stiff.”
While working on this painting I kept thinking about a few people. As a child there was a man at our church who my parents called the “Snake Doctor.” At first I was confused by this, imagining the guy holding a stethoscope up to an anaconda. I figured it out eventually. The subtleties between PhD and MD degrees were lost on a 6 year old. Many years later I ended up taking Herpetology from the Snake Doctor while in graduate school. Doc Bothner was an outgoing guy with an endless supply of hilarious stories and quotable one-liners. I taught a few labs for him, and we spent a lot of time in the woods looking for herps, but we never found a timber rattler.
The second person who kept coming to mind while working on this was Dan, a great friend who was my housemate during grad school. He had a bunch of snakes in our apartment. (When I was looking for a place to live in Ann Arbor, one of the professors who knew Dan suggested him as a housemate. He qualified it by adding, “There is one thing though… Dan has a lot of snakes.” That probably was a deal-breaker for most people, but it was a bonus for me!)
Somewhere along the line Dan had collected a gravid watersnake to photograph. Eventually the snake had cute little babies—twelve, if I remember correctly! A week or two later I came home for lunch and was using the bathroom when I spied something slithering on the bathroom floor. Two of the watersnakes were roaming around the bathroom. The tank they were supposed to be in always kept the big snakes contained, but the tiny guys found their way out. I put them back in the tank and went about making my lunch. For some reason I got in the habit of counting the baby snakes after that. I could imagine pouring out my corn flakes in the morning and having a wiggling snake in there.
The third person who was on my mind was my mother-in-law Merritt. We came across this timber rattler while on a hike with her. She is easily one of the biggest nature lovers I’ve ever met, with an enthusiam for all things wild.
Original Available.
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Nancy Pearsall
Cool! Nice job!