Puppies

This painting started with a memory. As a small child I grew up in a huge wild garden. One day I was exploring alone, picking through the thickets on the edge of my paradise, when I discovered a small dog with new puppies.  The smell and sound of those tiny packets of life, warm in my hands while the mother watched on, made me so happy. The feeling of a secret existence always continuing, even without me there, was a revelation.

This dog is in the throes of her life, absolutely at the mercy of her nature. As are we all. Humans like to dress it up, make it grand. But it isn’t really. We are born, we reproduce, we die, like every other creature. But in our hubris we use other species.

We make dogs extensions of ourselves. We pick up and discard them, lavish them with love, humanise them, neglect them.  We exchange adorable pictures of them, laughing at their human-like antics, dressing them up, revelling in their devotion. They gaze back at us with vulnerable dignity.

We are intruding into this moment, glimpsing a life process outside of ourselves. Nature has run rampant, the sheer number of puppies is preposterous, the drive to reproduce is vertiginously powerful. All around is the natural world, both sheltering and unseeing. A piece of white canvas like a frayed edge, reminds us we can’t believe our own eyes.