Meditations on Wildness

I am currently working on a selection of options for a friend's upcoming book's cover.

He and I spend a good amount of time thinking about and pursuing our own wildness,

trying to pull apart where that need comes from, and considering what that even means.

As a hyperactive, borderline feral kid, it very often felt like I had to learn to be a human.  

Sometimes people who meet me in a more formal situation have a hard time

imagining that I was a kid up a tree with matted hair and no ability to control 

the volume of my voice or most of the things that came out of my mouth.

I am always on the opposite end of that reality, 

forgetting that I have lost (or forfeited) so much of my sharp and feral ways. 

I know that this is crucial to my survival, but it still comes with an enormous amount of sadness. 

When you are young, especially a young kid with raging ADHD and few social skills,

 you eventually learn how to check every impulse, you eventually stop cutting off your hair in chunks

without any reason that you can understand or remember, you start figuring out how to sit still.

You find something you can focus on, and you draw.

 

DIY Philly Poster - In Progress

This is a detail snapshot of the poster I am completing illustrating tonight for my friends on the DIY PHL team.   

In their own words, "DIYPHL is a show and event listing for Philadelphia and surrounding areas... 

to promote and support a music and arts community..."  

I have been thinking so much lately about the blight of white nose syndrome on bats, 

how we are watching the great Chiroptera order dissolve at a rapid pace. 

The entire poster is bat-themed, though not all about species of Philadelphia because 

that would be too narrow a scope and because I love those brown long-eared bats 

from the UK (pictured above). 

While this has been a subject dear to my heart and that of many of my friends and other conservationists,

 it sprung back to the front of my brain after reading about the debate over the Bracken Bat Cave, 

the largest bat cave in the United States, which is currently threatened by development. 

While we are on the subject, this is a shot of a painting I made 

of a vampire bat for a Bat Sanctuary benefit a year or two ago - 

it is acrylic glass paint on mirror and I am so sad that I don't have 

a final photograph of it any longer.