I plan to use this blog for a number of purposes. I will post about elephant art, and elephant art-related topics.
I will also post about elephants, in general, and how one might find work in the elephant industry (and related fields.)
I will also post about work with other animals, since many people interested in working with elephants are also interested in working with other animals.
Toward that end I will post my own experiences working with elephants, as well as experiences of others I know (if they choose to share them.)
The purpose of the blog is not to sell anything. I don’t need to sell my books because they have been selling themselves quite well since they came out.
I’m a writer, and an artist and I am fascinated by the many ways that artists use elephants in their work.
Elephants are so intriguing to me because they seem to have such a variety of color and pattern in their skin, and it makes sense that people would want to replicate that.
I’m very interested in elephant conservation, as well.
I have been studying elephants for a long time, but I don’t want to be viewed as an expert. I am not a scientist or an elephant trainer or anything like that. I’m just someone who is interested in elephants and how they’re viewed in art**.”
Elephant art is becoming a popular topic on the Internet. People are using elephants as a symbol of their blogs, business cards and websites. Many artists are using elephant art in their paintings, sculptures and photographs.
The Elephant Art site offers information on the many different styles of elephant art. The goal is to provide you with all the information you need to get started with your own elephant art.
Elephant art has been around for centuries, but has recently become popular as an online symbol. Elephants have a long history of being used to represent royalty and strength. The Elephant Art site will show you how to use this symbolism for your own websites and blogs.
Elephant art is a 3,000-year-old tradition in India. The ancient Indian religious texts called the Vedas mention their use in ritual processions and as dancers in ceremonies.
In Hinduism, the elephant is associated with Ganesha, the god of wisdom and remover of obstacles. Elephants are also used for parades on special occasions. They are symbols of strength, power and dignity and are treated with great respect.
Elephants have been used by generations of Indians to pull war chariots. A team of six elephants can pull a 3-tonne battle chariot faster than a dozen strong men can run. They were also used to transport large stones for temples and palaces.
The first time I saw a real elephant I was nine years old. It was in the Copenhagen Zoo. I didn’t see a lot of other animals, but I remember my mother saying that the elephants were old and bored and should be in a nature preserve, not a zoo. I agreed with her, but somehow the elephants had grabbed my attention more than any of the other animals.
It was also at the Copenhagen Zoo that I got my first opportunity to draw an elephant. There was a painting of an elephant on the wall, and naturally I wanted to draw it. But not just copy it — draw it better. That’s how I learned to draw: copying things until they were better than what I copied from.
Teddy bears are another animal whose eyes are too small for their heads, but they don’t seem to mind.”
Elephants are famous for their memory; human memory is notoriously unreliable. For example, one of my early blog posts discussed a belief that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, which at the time was thought to be an indicator of self-awareness. But recent research has shown that elephants can recognize themselves even when the mirror image is flipped upside-down. The conclusion is that they are capable of recognizing others’ bodies regardless of their orientation, and they can also match their own body parts regardless of position or orientation of themselves or others. The capacity to do this appears to be a simple result of short-term rather than long-term memory.
In contrast, humans rely on long-term memory for objects and images: we remember our own face but not how it looks from different angles. This difference in mental ability between humans and elephants raises interesting questions about the development of intelligence.*
Elephants have much better memories than humans do**; but if you go back far enough (200 million years or so) the last common ancestor we shared with elephants also had much better memories than humans do now**.*
We’re descended from creatures with pretty impressive memories. And yet somehow we’ve managed to forget it. How did that happen?
One way to answer this
I think it will be important to have more people who are good at both art and technology, because then you get this feedback loop where one inspires the other.
When I was a kid, I was into computers and also into drawing, and what was missing for me was a way to relate the two. The Mac is a machine that lets you do that. You get a lot of power, but you also get some of the flexibility of crayons. We have some work to do in making it easier for kids to learn how to program, but I think we’re getting there.
If we can teach young people programming and also encourage them to be artists, then maybe we’ll see something interesting happen.