When she’s thirsty, Sally fills her water bottle by herself and carries it around at the Denver Zoo. The 44-year-old orangutan has recovered from major, “nerve-wracking” uterus surgery last year, surgeons say.
Photo: Cyrus McCrimmon / Associated Press (via SFGate: Day in Pictures)
I’m OBSESSED with her right now. I can’t believe she used ball point and watercolor! It’s outta control.
Is there any story behind what got you started drawing the monsters you draw?
“A lot of my inspiration comes from endangered species…when I was growing up I planned being a wildlife biologist and I ended up being an artist. A lot of my concerns are based on environmental problems. It’ll kind of come just randomly…I’ll read an article about a certain animal and I’ll be like ‘I like that’. It may have started as a certain species but the drawings take a long time and they change. It’s definitely a long process…when I start it’s about a specific species, but you know how it goes…a piece when you work on it long enough…it definitely changes over time.”
“I invent creatures, anthropomorphic, mutated, or pseudo mythical in imagery, using my imaginary world and bringing it into the physical world in an attempt to create a language that speaks about the human animal relationship and the natural and unnatural elements of it. I am faced with the fact that we live in a planet in decline, where almost every natural ecosystem in the world is slipping away. Human kind has created a planet of refugees; animals forced to flee ever farther from the insatiable encroachment of urban development, victims of a war for space which they cannot hope to win. My drawings refer to this decline and to the refugees it has created. I am left with the question of what is natural; are we (human beings) still a part of nature? If so, does that make all that we have created, cities, vehicles, factories, all technology, part of nature as well?”
Lily is a Great Dane that has been blind since a bizarre medical condition required that she have both eyes removed. For the last 5 years, Maddison, another Great Dane, has been her sight. The two are, of course, inseparable.
Animals are incredible and I want to spend the rest of my life with them.
