Red squirrels are just about as cute as it gets for common rodents. Ok, flying squirrels are cuter, but they don’t qualify as common here in central Michigan.
When choosing what to draw and paint, I usually follow whatever has my immediate interest and what I’ve managed to take good photos of. I have over a hundred sketches laying around that could be worked into a painting easily enough. Some never make the grade. Others go straight from the camera to the sketchbook and are almost immediately painted. Every so often I’ll ask Liesl and the kids what they think should be painted next. This time there were a lot of votes for a Red Squirrel.
In looking through the most visited pages and Pins of my website, my family seemed to hit on something. The most visited pages are for Halloween Hats that I made for the kids. Those account for about 3/4 of the visits to the blog! A distant second is a pencil sketch of a Red Squirrel. You have to move way down to #5 to hit a bird painting! So I guess squirrels are more popular than birds!? At least that seems to be what my very non-scientific, low-sample survey showed. I knew that spiders and insect art would yield low scores, but I didn’t picture there being such a strong squirrel fan base.
So, here comes the squirrel! Honestly, I didn’t paint this for a long time because it was too straightforward. In general I like doing paintings that balance several elements on the page. This one was basically a squirrel on a stick, which makes it more of an illustration than a complex piece of “art.” I’ve done a few paintings like this over the last year, but I usually prefer something more composed with more elements on the page.
Maybe this is just art school baggage? While there I was frequently told that none of my work could be considered art because it featured animals. Worse yet, it was representational! That was the kiss of death in art school, where Post Abstract Expressionism seemed to be king. The preferred insult was to refer to your work as “renderings” and to call you a “renderer,” which meant,“That’s not art.”
Whatever! It’s kind of funny to me now because the pieces I was creating at the time were—by my current standards—pretty darn loose.
Sure, animals are a bit overdone at times. I almost never paint raptors or ducks for this reason. I tend to avoid super simple compositions, but occasionally they are the right choice. It seemed to work for this little guy, even if it is more illustrative than art.
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