It is a Poor Craftsman Who Blames His Tools.

When I took my first roll of 35mm film with a 1954 Soviet Kiev camera (a genuine Contax made with parts confiscated from Dresden during the WWII and renamed as Kiev), I took it to a small photography shop to be developed. I remember the phrase painted above the darkroom room:

                                        “It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools”

And that has stayed with me through the various genres of art work I have tackled in the past 50 years.

… Painting on animal hide, especially hare hide, is one of my favorite modes of expression. In part because hare hide is never smooth leather – it has texture, veins, colour and a shape resulting from how the hide was harvested.

In other words the tool I use in lieu of a canvas has its own story and suggestions already before I start painting.

So, I spend a little bit of time “reading” that story and often the painting motif or subject derives from what the hare hide is ready to participate in the process with me.

… I like painting tigers and cougars on hide. It seems a harmony of materials, texture and individual characters. So, in the past I have painted “old” tigers when the hide was of a color and shade that seemed to promote the passage of time. I have also painted tigers at their prime, at least how I anthropomorphically would translate a tiger’s facial expression to age.

Here are examples of these two variations in tiger face painting:

… As I was looking through the preserved hare hides from the fall, one jumped at me as a good canvas for a happy and mature tiger. Why? I am not sure. Perhaps the various colours and especially the darker ones where the snout of the tiger would be.

Ok, so I drew the boundaries of where the face would be and started by placing the tip of the nose and the eyes. As always all my painting is with a “knife” which actually is the broken blade of a letter opener… And I use a combination of acrylic and oil paint to accommodate the hides spots where the oil would be absorbed or not.

Here is the very start of the project – not much there to define a tiger, yet:

After a few touches of my paining knife, the happy tiger came to life. I decided to exaggerate the lips a bit to accentuate that feeling of being at peace:

And the painting was completed with the addition of whiskers as shown at the top of this page. While I have a frame for it, the paint needs to dry for a short while. Usually it is the oil of the nose tip that touches the frames glass and smears it if framed too soon…

August 4, 2019

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019