Tigers and Mountain Lions, Oh My!

In my last posting I put together examples of hats I have experimented with using hare and squirrel skin. I have done various paintings on animal hide and today I would like to summarize my paintings of tigers and mountain lions (puma concolor).

A.    Tiger. This is an oil painting using a makeshift painting palette knife consisting of an old letter opener blade. I use the impasto technique of mixing the paint directly on the canvas (hare hide in this case) and using only my letter opener blade to paint. Depending on the imperfections of the hide, I may use a foundation of acrylic paint upon which I use only oil.

B.     Mountain lion. Sometimes called puma or panther, the mountain lion is the largest and most dangerous cat of North America. Many of us living in Arizona have seen a mountain lion, and we have learned to protect ourselves and especially our dogs. While a mountain lion is a fierce predator, it is beautiful and majestic.

When painting mountain lions, I follow the old Latin saying “homo homini lupus” or “man is a wolf for fellow man”. Perhaps a bit of a pessimistic saying, I have learned to appreciate that statement through my life experiences. So, I try to incorporate that concept in my puma paintings by having one or both of the eyes as human eyes.

For example, this one has its right eye as a cat eye and the other one as a human eye.

This one has both eyes as human eyes giving the painting a feel of an avatar…

And this puma is a transitional one – its right eye is a cat eye but the left one is neither cat nor human…

And finally, this one is a minimalist painting where its right eye has an aggressive human appearance but it is anatomically more of a cat's eye.

No matter how I see the mountain lions, they are part of my environment. And painting them on desert hare skin makes it a genuinely Arizonian experiment!

April 21, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019