A Unicorn With More Than One Cornus

Decades ago, on a camping trip in Moose, Wyoming, near the Grand Tetons National Park, I saw a pack of wolves chasing a horse running at full gallop.  Since then I have not seen horses running away from wolves or coyotes, but it obviously happens as last week I found the carcass of a young horse half consumed by coyotes.

Given my inclination to think of art as a pathway to metamorphosis, I brought part of the skull to my studio to give it a new meaning, post coyotes.

It was a young horse as the skull was not large and it had all its teeth:

And these were in very good shape:

So, I decided to proceed with my personal design that I have used on wild donkey, deer and elk skulls. None of the artists I know who do skull painting use cross-species combination of materials. This time, given the size of the skull, I decided to use coyote tails instead of squirrel tails as before. After all, the horse succumbed to coyotes and they will together tell a new story.

Here are the materials I had in mind -- a raccoon's face, water buffalo horns, feathers, the head of a squirrel, coyote tails, peacock feathers, blue topaz fragments and turquoise stones:

While all the materials I had seemed to work well together, the right eye of the raccoon was not as amenable to the taxidermy glass eye:

So, I decided to take some anthropomorphic liberties (!) and cover the eye with an eye patch... I think now the raccoon looks more like a burglar with an attitude!

The nasal cavity of a horse's skull is anatomically wider than that of an elk or a deer in proportion to the skull itself. And the coyotes seem to have nibbled on the adjacent bones making that cavity wider. This gave me the opportunity to use a squirrel's head and make this work unique:

Finally all the pieces had come together and the unicorn-with-two-horns was ready!

It found its place on the wall next to one of my paintings on hare skin.

When looking at the skull from under it, the blue-eyed squirrel looks back at you...

Now I hope that not leaving the skull in the desert to petrify and crumble under the sun, was a good idea.

July 22, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019