How things are filed

Most writing about animal pictures files them by species, by period or by medium. This site files them by what the artist had physically in front of them: a living animal, a dead one, or a photograph of one. It is the only variable in the subject that changes the work all the way down — posture, light, the set of a wing, the eye, the honesty of a single feather.

The three drawers

From Life holds work made in front of a living animal, at whatever distance the animal allowed. From the Skin holds work made from prepared specimens: exact in feather and measurement, inherited posture and invented eyes. From the Photograph holds work made from an image that had already flattened, cropped and chosen the animal before the artist arrived.

Two further sections cut across all three. Anatomy & Movement is about what the body is doing under the surface; Media & Process is about what graphite, watercolour, boxwood, copper and bronze permit and forbid. Neither cares where the artist was standing, which is exactly why they belong outside the three drawers.

What this is not

Not a gallery, dealer, agent or auction house. Nothing here is for sale and nothing here is valued; there are no prices, no estimates and no represented artists. We do not publish profiles of living artists. Where a picture is discussed, it is discussed as a piece of work with a method behind it.

Reading a picture backwards

The useful consequence of filing this way is that it teaches a reader to look for method. A dull, flat eye and a tail spread as if pressed; a neck a hand too long; a wing frozen in a configuration no eye resolves — these are not failures of skill but fingerprints of a source. Every piece on the site declares which drawer it came from, and the comparison between the drawers is the argument.

Start with the full index, or with the piece the site opens on: A Hundred Hours in the Hide.