If my work is meaningful to you, please support my Patreon! There you can find a deeper insight into my work and it’s creation, including work in progress breakdowns, sketches, discounts on prints and first grabs for new originals, and lots of big art feelings.

---

I have a handful of friends who have an affinity with coyotes. They have chosen lives with less between them and the land, who exist as a part of the ecosystem around them. They are glad for both the joys and the challenges that brings them, and beyond that, they stir up their own troubles with a curiosity too strong for their own good. Leap first, look later, and survive with your fur singed.
One of them once said to me that perhaps the reason that the settlers and the ranchers have so feared and hunted both the wolf and the coyote is that when they look into those eyes, they know there is a sort of person looking back, and that knowledge unsettles them. It is too much of a threat to their paradigm to permit.
Now the wolf is mostly gone from this stolen land. But the coyote remains-- a survivalist, so used to falling into their own self-made traps, that the traps of man are no great surprise. It is no wonder that those men who think themselves above nature cannot seem to outsmart them.
But what more does a coyote know? What does it mean to be an adaptive creature, when so much of the world around you is changing? What does that mean for us humans, who are also adaptive creatures, who have made for ourselves and those who share our atmosphere the ultimate trap that will swallow so many living things?
Does nature have rage at what we have done, at what we continue to do? Can this collective subconscious of living things feel hurt, either as an awareness of something gone wrong, or on a personal level? Does it feel a part of itself, the part which is ourselves, wrenched against it, like a hand twisted about to choke the air out of the throat which provides its own life's blood?
At what point does it feel sorrow for us, a deep mourning for lost ways, and at what point does that sorrow turn to resentment, turn to rage?
In this moment of eye contact, of a soul bearing witness to another soul, there is a knowing in such striking golden eyes. The flash of understanding, the strike of illuminating knowledge, as each sees the other and that truth is held. There is so much to be gained from this mutual knowing; we can better understand ourselves not only by noticing the parts of ourselves we are self-conscious about having exposed, but more importantly, we have the chance to let the truth and reality of the other wash over us, to let their reality temporarily replace our own, and to suddenly view the world we live in through completely new eyes.

18" x 24" oil on panel from 2020, original sold. Prints and such are available in my shop (linked below!)

My Website • Patreon • Store • Tumblr • Twitter