Giraffes

Sparky has started a great new series of paintings whereby Bee tells him what to paint, and he incorporates her incongruous ideas onto the canvas. These paintings are colorful, and have a wonderful, happy loopy feeling to them. The latest one he is working on uses imagery of giraffes, peaches, and the Kentucky Derby. It reminded me of our last visit to the Woodland Park Zoo with my parents a couple of weeks ago. Bee especially loves elephants and giraffes, and we always have to see both whenever we are at a zoo. The elephants were especially charming this time around, as one of them, a young Asian female named Bamboo, peeled and ate an orange with her trunk, and then proceeded to pee and poop copious amounts of urine and dung for the entertainment of all the kids. They hooted and hollered as she peed what seemed to be a rather large river: this big stream of urine went on forever. And the poops were enormous. It was pretty amazing, and we all clapped when she was finished. Bee still talks about it. Next, we stopped in to visit the giraffes. The zoo has this program in place where you can pay $5 to feed the giraffes from a platform. We showed up right before this feeding took place and the giraffes seemed to know it was almost time. One of them walked up to us, stretched his head in our direction, almost touching us as he smelled for food. Then he'd back up and do it all over again. It was kind of weird, this poor giraffe just kept repeating this process, like a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I felt sorry for this poor OCD giraffe. I would much rather the animals were in their natural habitats instead of locked up, but some zoos were better than others, and Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo is pretty nice. And the giraffes had plenty of room, lots of friends to socialize with, and probably enjoy being hand fed by adoring zoo patrons. I recently read an articles in the Los Angeles Times about Jane Goodall. And although she would rather see animals in the wild, due to several factors (shrinking habitats, some animals being endangered, some being hunted), she feels that  zoos are often a safer place for them, and I have to agree with her.  (One of the interesting things about Jane Goodall is that she suffers from Prosopagnosia, a.k.a. face blindness, which is a memory impairment for faces and patterns. Oddly, she cannot recognize peoples faces, but has no problem recognizing her beloved chimps. How strange! It is mentioned in practically every article about her, but I always forget about it, and then I'm amazed by it all over again.)

Anyway, Sparky's new paintings are psychedelic both conceptually and physically, and have a wacky immediacy to them, and I can't wait to see this latest one finished.