Drawing elephants and other animals

Elephants fighting: 17th Century, Rajput: the Hada Master

If you told me I could own one drawing from all of the drawing collections in the world, I might well chose this one of fighting elephants from 17th century India. It is a wonderful drawing, has such rich content, is embedded in a real moment, uses the page in such an interesting way and above all is drawn so sensitively that the elephants are as alive and responsive now as they were 400 years ago. The dynamic writhing forms in the centre could almost be fighting squids. The straight spears of the soldiers/elephant controllers, stand on the edges of the square and take up the same visual weight as the geometrically drawn architecture. These spiky triangles of spears and architecture visually play off against the human protagonists who desperately try to keep the elephants in the frame. As a counterpoint, one of the drivers is leaping out of harms way while the other sits centrally in the composition as everything whirls around him. There is an economical use of colour too. Most of the paper is left uncoloured, but selected elements are carefully coloured in. Small patches of red and white pick out clothes and tusks and establish a secondary rhythm that riffs with the main one of swirling curves and helps us work our way to the edges of the composition and the straight edged brittle rhythm of the spears and building edges. It feels as if the elephants have knocked the buildings over; the architecture being so very insubstantial in comparison to the dynamic mass of the elephants; the construction lines of towers and walls falling away from each other, as the artist attempts to fit architectural space into the flat dynamic of elephant energy. Fine lines and dots mark out the elephant's texture, their skins are drawn lovingly as if the artist wanted to caress them, their bodies adorned in bands of red and white, as if they were dressed for a dance and not being prodded into mortal combat. The image below is another wonderful drawing from the same elephant series by the Hada master and within the Indian Rajput tradition these drawings have been very influential. 

17th Century, Rajput Drawing: the Hada Master

If you look at this drawing below from the early 18th century you can see how the influence was passed on. 

Elephants running: The Kota Master 1720

Artists like the Hada Master had a major influence on the development of painting in Kota, in both style and content, in particular the concept that that nature in many ways echoes human passion. In the drawing immediately above, the abstract shapes of the architecture are even more abstracted, but this time one elephant goes through a gateway, thus effectively being cut off at the knee. This time the elephant handlers have what appear to be burning torches on the ends of their poles rather than sharp prongs. The rhythm traverses the image from left to right and doesn't revolve around the centre as was the case in the Hada Master's more square image. Even so a life energy runs through the image and there is a sort of exhilaration in our recognition of what an animal of this size must be like when moving at speed.

An elephant combat: Black ink and charcoal with yellow highlights and white chalk on pounced paper 17th century

You can see the artist at work in the drawing above, the chalk drawing is reinforced by the ink drawing. As the image is found, it is sharped up and made ready for the next stage, which would be adding highlights and touches of colour, in a similar way to the images further above, but for whatever reason this never happened. 
Elephants would have been a common sight for Indian Rajput artists but would be a rare animal as far as western European artists were concerned.

While the Hada Master was making his drawings, it is fascinating to think about the fact that Rembrandt encountered elephants for the first time, however for him they must have been much more exotic. In my mind I like to think of these two artists working at exactly the same time, both watching their images arriving out of their hands' movements as much as out of their minds. 

Rembrandt 

The Hada Master knows what elephants look like, and is able to engage much more inventively with action and composition, but Rembrandt is still searching for form. He won't have seen elephants before and he needs to add them to his visual vocabulary. Rembrandt sensitively feels for the elephants' forms by touch. You can feel him tracing each individual elephant's mass as he mentally moves his hands over their various surfaces. These elephants feel as if they have minds of their own, there is something about the way Rembrandt has concentrated on the drawing around the elephants' eyes that makes these creatures almost human in their appeal. 

So what is it about these two different bodies of drawing that is so appealing to me? I think it's about empathy and love. These two qualities unite all these drawings, and whether the animals are part of a common cultural heritage or are new to the artist, they have been responded to with great respect, with a feeling for their 'animalness' and a sense of belonging to the same world as the artist. We feel that both the Hada Master and Rembrandt are also animals, animals that are looking at other animals and in that looking they recognise a similar sentient being. It is in these moments of recognition that philosophies are born and people decide that they are animist in belief. Because these drawings are made by hand on small sheets of paper, they are also gentle reminders of how humans create compacts with inanimate things such as inks and chalks and paper, an empathy with their materials that helps to communicate their feelings to others like myself 400 years into the future.

Joanna Bourke had this to say about the relationship that we have with animals; "In complex and sometimes contradictory ways, the ideas, values and practices used to justify the sovereignty of a particular understanding of ‘the human’ over the rest of sentient life are what create society and social life. Perhaps the very concept of ‘culture’ is an attempt to differentiate ourselves from our ‘creatureliness,’ our fleshly vulnerability". It is perhaps time to remind ourselves that we are animals, and one way of doing this is to spend more time in their company. 

Probably the most ubiquitous drawings of animals are those of cats and dogs. They are so common that we can forget how close the relationship is between ourselves and these domesticated creatures. Below are a couple of drawings by Gericault, a man who was obsessed with the problem of how to animate flesh and how to give to his drawings and paintings a living reality, something he could only accomplish by spending time in the company of animals. 

Gericault a sleeping dog and cat studies

Our observations of animals have become more and more lens based and when thinking about looking at animals we tend to turn to filmed documentary as the medium of choice. This format can however be approached in new ways and with interesting consequences. In 2004 Francis Alÿs made the video 'Nightwatch', which followed the movement of a fox through the National Portrait Gallery. By bringing the static images of dead people together with the live movements of a fox, Alÿs allows us to meditate on our relationship with nature. The fox is so alive and the art on the walls is so 'dead', nature invades culture and as it does it reminds us of how wonderful every creature is. This is perhaps the paradox of all art, in making it we struggle to recreate our experience of life, but as Pygmalion (especially in Edward Burne-Jones' vision below) discovered, art is never quite like life, always at one remove.  

Francis Alÿ: The Nightwatch

Edward Burne-Jones: Pygmalion 

The drawing by Burne-Jones above is a very poor one, it is so lifeless, the artist Pygmalion rests his chisel on a totally inert figure of the sculpture that is to become Galatea, a figure that in this drawing you don't feel could ever come to life no matter how magical the situation or how supportive the Goddess Venus was being and if it did, it could ever have wit or humanity. 

See also:

Why draw animals
Indian aesthetics 

References

Steve Baker (2000) The Postmodern Animal  London: Reaktion Books
Joanna Bourke (2011) What it means to be human London: Counterpoint press