Somehow my family’s farm always attracts animals, wild and domestic. One of the stranger ones was emus, my inspiration for “Emu Elegance.” One day my parents got a call from a nearby animal shelter. The manager said that a pair of emus was running loose on a highway; one was killed, but the other was at the shelter in a makeshift pen in the parking lot. This shelter killed animals it didn’t have room for, and this emu was next if we didn’t take it. So we instantly hooked our horse trailer to our SUV and we picked the bird up. We thought this emu was female, so we named her Emmy, but now we think she’s actually a he (males and females look alike).We made a large pen for it, with a six foot high fence, with plenty of room for her to run. We then bought two other female emus, named Lola and Queenie, to keep her company. I discovered then that emus are very strange. They’re smaller cousins of the ostrich, but they lay blue-green, very large eggs. They stand six to seven feet tall and they can run up to 30 mph. Their feathers are the most unique of any bird in the animal kingdom; for every feather stem, there are two individual feathers that sprout from it! They are very hard to paint, though. Why is elegance in the animal world always so complicated?

“Emu Elegance” 11x14 inch canvas. Acrylic. © Cara Bevan