Since the first cave etchings, man has been representing the animal world in artwork. The appeal of animals to artists is as broad and as varied as are the artists themselves: Some appreciate the form of animals, their colors, their eyes; or they feel a connection to animals as living creatures sharing the earth with us; many are inspired by close bonds with animals in their personal lives; they might feel sorrow over mankind’s ill-treatment of the animal world and want to present a vision of greater harmony; and there are artists who identify with mythology and the primordial element animal imagery can invoke.

On the Vineyard, farm animals – such as the polled Hereford cows in the Middle Road field near Chilmark’s Beetlebung Corner or the horses at Nip ’n Tuck Farm in West Tisbury – are an inextricable component of the Island’s physical beauty and charm. The same is true for the wildlife here – the red-tailed hawks, the gulls and ducks, the deer, rabbits, raccoons, and even the skunks. They are all a part of the natural mystique of this place, part of the reason why some of us choose to live here year-round, and others to return seasonally, year after year. So it should come as no surprise that a large number of Island artists frequently portray animals in their artwork, whether as part of landscapes, or as subject matter unto themselves.

“There are animals on this Island that become fixtures on the landscape,” says Chris Morse, owner of the Granary and Field galleries in West Tisbury, as well as the Gardner Colby Gallery in Edgartown. “Like the oxen at Brookside Farm [in Chilmark]. They are integral to the landscape; one needs the other. The cows in the afternoon light give the landscape more purpose.”

Holly Alaimo, manager of Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs, concurs. “I think a lot of people who think of the Vineyard, who maybe vacation here, have great fondness for our fields with sheep and horses,” she says. “It’s a very calming thing; it feels like you’re stepping back in time.” And, she adds, much Vineyard art reflects that feeling. “I’ve seen Allen Whiting paint a dot on a painting, and it’s still a sheep. You know it’s a sheep, and you know it’s supposed to be there.”

Both Holly and Chris agree that artwork depicting animals does not necessarily sell better than other types of work. “But,” says Chris, “some people respond well to animals in art because animals are comforting.”

“The buyers who purchase animal art are very enthusiastic about it,” says Holly. “Whatever it is about the animal in the work, the buyer is relating to it in a big way. Portraits of people don’t sell very well, because when you take one home, it’s like inviting someone else to live in your house. But with animal pictures, it’s the opposite: You bring one home, you love it, it’s your constant companion, and you don’t have to clean up after it.”

Arguably the first year-round Vineyard artist to achieve real stature was Stanley Murphy, who frequently incorporated animals into his paintings. “In his portraits,” says Mary Boyd, his granddaughter, “of farmers, fishermen, and the like, animals were often reflective of workingman stuff, the everyday rather than the extraordinary.” A striking portrait of Mary shows her with a large crow on her arm. In fact, this crow, named Harrison, was Mary’s pet, but the juxtaposition of little girl and dark black bird gives the portrait a mystical feeling. It is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez’s portraits of enormous dogs dwarfing midgets in the royal court. “I think there may have been a particular portrait that inspired my grandfather when he was doing this piece. He had something very specific in mind; he wanted me dressed in a very particular way, and he wanted Harrison in the picture.”

Images of the works of six contemporary Vineyard artists follow, accompanied by descriptions, in their own words, of the role of animals in their art. They discuss the appeal of animals both in their personal lives and as subject matter, and the ways their work has developed by including them.

Leslie Baker

My depiction of animals began with The Third Story Cat [Little Brown and Company, 1987], a children’s book I wrote and illustrated. That book did really well; I received both national and international awards for it. It set the stage for me being thought of as somebody who does animals. So practically every children’s book I did from then on had animals in it. I even snuck animals in when they weren’t supposed to be there. Then I got asked to do cat note cards and the like, and it just took off without my really doing anything. I had begun my career as a fine artist. I did the children’s books while my daughter, Emma, was growing up; I haven’t done one in six years. I’ve been doing fine art, largely landscapes, but now I’ve come full circle and am beginning to incorporate animals into my fine art work.

Animal paintings have always been thought of as a minor genre. There’s always this thing about making them cute, and animals are cute, but I wanted to figure out how to work in this genre and still be doing fine art. So I started doing these very small “memory portraits” of animals I’ve had in my life. [English artist] David Hockney once said, I don’t paint my dogs; I paint my love for my dogs. My memory portraits are of animals with whom I’ve had a very loving, close relationship. I think of the Hockney quote while I make them. A lot of artists look at animals as a structure, or as a beautiful thing, but it is the relationship I have with animals that informs my work. When I did the sheep poster for the Agricultural Fair in 2003, I formed a relationship with that sheep. I stood there for a really long time, and it looked me right in the eye and started communicating with me. I said, “I have to paint you.”
What I’m working on now is small contemporary portraits of people and their animals, trying to convey something of the relationship between the person and the animal, so as to enhance the sense you get of the personality of the person. I have a background as a portrait artist as well as all the rest, and I feel that the work I’m doing now is combining all of the kinds of work I’ve done in the past.

Leslie Baker is an artist whose career spans almost forty years. She has taught fine arts at schools and colleges in the Philadelphia area, and she is also the author and/or illustrator of fifteen books for children. She currently shows her work at the Shaw Cramer Gallery in Vineyard Haven. Her work can also be viewed on her website, www.lbaker.com. She lives in West Tisbury with her husband and several dogs.

Ben Cabot

I’ve always loved wildlife. I am very connected to the natural world, between hunting and fishing and hiking. I’ve always especially liked bird watching, filling bird feeders, making bird feeders. I’ve sculpted a seal, some fish, and a couple of penguins, but otherwise my work has been almost exclusively birds. I think birds appeal to me in part because of the whole magic of flight, the idea of the freedom that gives them, and the ability to see the world from another perspective. It’s funny; I don’t really enjoy flying. I did sky dive once, and it was spectacular. Going through the clouds and the feeling of flight was amazing, but generally, I feel much more comfortable on the ground or in a boat than in the air.

In my sculptures, I am interested in raw outline, in silhouettes. I have always been fascinated that the first page of the [original] Peterson Field Guide to the Birds is all silhouettes – that you can identify a bird just by its outline. Coloring and feathering don’t matter so much. The old simple, hand-carved decoys, which were also called silhouettes, didn’t have a lot of coloring or paint. And the Native Americans made duck decoys out of reeds and grasses. They still did the trick, because a lot of animals are essentially colorblind.

I don’t work from models or sketches when I’m sculpting. The animals just come out of the stone, which makes them all very different from one another. They really take on a personality of their own. The birds on a post that I make – when I put the eyes on them, they come to life.

Ben Cabot is a self-taught sculptor who has been making works primarily in stone for nearly ten years. His work is represented on-Island by the Granary
Gallery and the Field Gallery, both in West Tisbury, and four of his sculptures are in the permanent collection of the George Washington University
in Washington, D.C. His work can also be viewed on his website, www.cabotcarving.com. He lives in West Tisbury with his wife and daughter, as well
as two dogs, a cat, and in the summertime, several chickens.

Cindy Kane

By and large, the only animals I paint are birds – for the color. I think that painting birds has helped me become a better painter, as figure drawing has done for other artists. It steadies my hand, and it trains my eye.

Birds have always been a part of my iconography. In the beginning, my birds were menacing; they were more like dream metaphors, symbolic of tumultuousness. They were very raw and almost abstracted: the outline of a hawk etched into the paint, for example. I miss those. As my eye has become more trained through studying birds, they have become more recognizable, more precise, and in fact, they have lost that more raw, emotional quality that they had in my earlier work. Maybe it’s like this with first novels too – there’s a newness about the experience of writing that makes the early work especially fresh. Over the long haul, you spend time trying to get back to the freshness of your beginnings. My birds are very well painted, very mature now, but they don’t have the pizazz, the vulnerability of the early ones.

I see that my paintings of birds have emotional resonance for other people, but I don’t have emotional associations with birds. Like fish, birds don’t have much emotional tenor. It’s all about aesthetics. My paintings are more cerebral than emotional, the bird paintings in particular. Hopefully, they’re visually fascinating. Painting birds is very detailed, requiring precision and concentrated color. It is about posture, gesture, stance, detail, color, and precision. And it is joyful. It is optimistic.

Cindy Kane has been painting for most of her life and has shown her work nationally for more than twenty years. For the past year and a half, she has partnered with fifty journalists to incorporate their writings into her art. The culmination of this collaboration is her collection called “The Helmet Project,” which focuses on war correspondence, using military helmets as the canvas on which she paints and collages the journalists’ writings and other mementos. The project, which was on exhibit this spring at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts in New York City, is seeking a permanent home. Cindy lives in Vineyard Haven with her husband, two daughters, and a cat. Her work can be seen at Carol Craven Gallery in Vineyard Haven and on her website at www.cindykane.com.

Washington Ledesma

We people manipulate the natural environment to our own advantage: We dump trash into the ocean; we burn jungles to raise cows to feed ourselves. What right do we have to do this to the life that was there before us? We don’t give back the opportunity to regenerate. Animals are the ones who suffer. When I started fishing here, I soon realized that if I was going to take one of these wonderful specimens out of the water, it was for eating. But that wasn’t enough. Now when I catch a fish, I hold him in my hand, I look him in the eye, I give him a little kiss, and I throw him back. When I do a fish in my art, I use all different colors to create the optical illusion of movement. We here on Martha’s Vineyard are surrounded by water, and if the water keeps rising, one day I may need to learn to be a fish too.

From the time of the cave men, people have depicted animals in art.

Probably by painting them, they believed that they were possessing them, or joining with them. Animals have always been symbols – like the elephant, which is a symbol of power. I once met an elephant at a zoo. The guard said, “Look! She loves you. Look at how she is looking at you.” I looked her in the eye, and we were connected. She touched me with her trunk. I was so moved, I was shaking. When I see a little garden snake, I get so excited. They move, they’re slippery; they are so primal. When I catch them, I hold them in the air, and they dance, and I dance with them. Sometimes I put their heads in my mouth, gently, to merge with them. It is such a primordial experience.

I grew up around animals, on a farm. There were always cats around, and also cows and pigs, frogs too. All of these animals are in my work. I am painting from memories; that’s why I have the freedom to create animals that don’t look precisely as they do in life. They are the essence of the animal to me, my idea of the animal. I cover my surfaces with animals and people. All the elements are in harmony, and it’s like you’re going back to Paradise, where everything was in equilibrium, where man didn’t impose his power over that of the beasts, and vice versa.

Washington Ledesma has been making art for more than thirty years, working in ceramics and paint. A native of Uruguay, he has lived with his wife in Oak Bluffs for almost twenty-five years. He has shown at many Island galleries, now mainly at the Louisa Gould Gallery in Vineyard Haven, and he is a regular participant in artisans’ festivals on the Island. He also teaches painting and ceramics workshops at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs, among other venues. His work can be viewed at his studio by appointment, as well as on his website, www.washingtonledesma.com.

Richard Lee

What draws me to paint animals is the nature of life, the interconnectedness of all of life. I paint from a fascination with nature and the origins of the Green Man [an ancient symbol of rejuvenation, rebirth, and springtime]. He is often depicted with tendrils springing from his head and mouth and limbs. The tendrils and twinery of the greenery goes into the flowers, which connect to the insects and butterflies, and then to bird life and animals, and the satyrs and the great god of nature, Pan. This idea for me has zoomorphic form, and so that is how I paint: All the elements are interacting, inseparable, and interchangeable. There are so many ancient symbols of creatures. I’m also influenced by the grotesqueries discovered in Herod’s Temple – all the zoomorphic creatures doing all sorts of non-natural things; a tendril becoming a human and the like. It’s not the negative meaning of grotesque; it has more to do with the interconnectedness of all things in nature.

Aside from our family cat and the pet cemetery where all the other doggies and kitties now live, I have an active relationship with my bird feeder. It attracts a wide variety of birds, and I could sit and watch them all day. It’s therapeutic. I also have a collection of animal skulls I’ve found on my hikes, and which I have gilded. They’re quite beautiful. The gilding changes them; it alters the sense of death and empowers them with a magical presence. And I have a number of trophy mounts found in junk shops, which I have painted and gilded, which again transforms them from trophies into objects with magical potential. It goes back to the cave men and the powers they invested in animals. There is something divine in that form of worship.

Richard Lee has been painting for more than forty years, working exclusively in reverse painting on glass. His work can be seen at his gallery in Vineyard Haven, next door to Che’s Lounge off Main Street. He lives in West Tisbury with his wife and a feral cat.

Janet Woodcock

My animals project happened by accident. I happened to be invited to come to a farm – Ann Hopkins’s farm in West Tisbury – and I got close to animals for the first time, and I realized how beautiful they were. As I started making the photographs, I realized that the animals had so much individuality and personality. It felt like when I was making portraits of people, the same process. So I started pursuing it from that point of view. I wanted to make portraits where the image would reveal something about the subject, the depth of the creature. I grew up in a city, had never paid farm animals any mind, so this was very different for me, very profound. I had no idea that pigs were funny and smart and played games.

Each breed would reveal its own challenges and joy. Sheep are hard, because they’re timid, and they function in a group. It was difficult – I had to be very patient – to get just one alone. Pigs can be huge, and therefore intimidating, and they’re fast, so I had to overcome my fear with them. But I really enjoyed being around all of those animals, trying to understand them.

I worked on my animal pictures for seven years. I stopped because I didn’t want to start repeating myself, but I may go back. It really changed the way I viewed the world. Before, there were people, and then there were animals. But I began to see that with, say, cows, they have a culture, a way of being and existing that really isn’t, in the end, profoundly different from the way we are. It changed my perspective; I see now that I am not significantly different from any other animal, and I am trying to appreciate and respect the way all living creatures are trying to navigate their way through this planet.

Janet Woodcock has been a professional photographer since 1982 and photographed animals extensively from 1996 to 2003. She works traditionally, making gelatin-silver prints in an era in which most photographers are working digitally. On the Island, she shows at the Field Gallery in West Tisbury, and her work can also be seen on her website, www.janetwoodcock.com. She lives in the woods in Vineyard Haven with her partner and, sadly she says, no pets at the moment.