I honestly don’t know if this is a skunk or one of those Willow Run dinosaur descendants like Fenn. Never asked Taral and now I can’t. So, you know what? I’m just going to say he’s a skunk.

Roller blades had only become a thing a little over ten years before he drew the character and the pose. I took it and coloured it up in Painter and shaded it, then dashed off the humourous little poem to go with it. I think this is one of the ones I did that he particularly liked; if I’m not mistaken, he even posted it here at some point.

Like me, Taral tended to draw his non-human characters barefoot, and as often as not, with as little costuming as the situation called for or would allow. He tended to appreciate the simple and pastoral; it was unquestionably one of his major themes. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I think it was his principal theme… a sensuality in nature that not infrequently shaded into the erotic. This isn’t one of those, of course, but it’s somewhere between the way humans ordinarily comport themselves and how other animals do.

Also of note on a personal level, this is one of the places Taral led me to in our wanderings in the early 2000s. There were one or two trips to his old neighbourhood where he showed me places that were important or distinctive in some way. When he was a young man, he lived in the Willowdale neighbourhood for 15 or 20 years. It’s the same neighbourhood the band Rush hails from. Gee, I wonder if Taral knew Geddy or Alex? He never said…

Anyway, this was a park about a kilometre north of where he lived. It has a little creek running through it and I know it was one of his favourite places back in the day. The creek could be crossed on foot; it featured natural bridges of fallen trees and twists and turns full of large boulders placed and rounded by the last ice age. I’m sure it was a place that lived in his imagination and inspired him; no doubt it’s represented in any number of the naturalistic pieces that he created over the years. I myself was back there several times in the early 2000s; photographs I took (like this one of the park entrance) showed up as the backgrounds in many of the pieces I did. I really ought to go back. Relive the journey. On foot, of course. Not blades…