Urban Wildlife is a hand-made book I crafted sometime around 1993 or 1994 in New York City. It is drawn with nib pen and india ink on semitransparent paper. It was illustrated over the course of a few hours, simply stream-of consciousness drawing the fragments of ideas floating around in my head. Clearly I was lonely for the wide open spaces of the desert, yet even I am baffled by the drawing's narrative. Recurring props and characters include telephone poles, birds, bones, generators, cacti, bedposts, electrical outlets, wild dogs, filthy factory corners, vast open skies and the ever-present infinite horizon. Animals are often seen lurking in the margins, just out of sight or dashing out of the frame in the same manner the fae are said to only be viewable out of the corner of one's eye. What you once thought was a wild dog later shifts into a four-poster bed, a dreamer's cruise ship through the abandoned landscape. Terri Windling perhaps pegged it best when she wrote that paint is the fae salve in the eye that allows us to see the other world. Things are never as they really seem, and the ambiguity of these abstract and frustratingly familiar objects encourages the viewer to change her mind from one moment to the next. Art is, after all, little more than a magician's mirror. These images are intended to be viewed with the drawings beneath it clearly visible them through the thin paper. Often three or four drawings are discernable beneath, creating a foggy and false depth-of-field that occupies several planes at once. Like an animated film or storyboard, a cohesive story in a stark inner landscape begins to unfold. This is the world I often see when I close my eyes, where objects are so narrow and slight they almost seem to vaporize and blow away, or in the case of the emerging layered images, seem to materialize out of thin air. Other objects have such a solid mass it is almost suffocating. Ah, I have said too much. Enough words. The twenty illustrations from Urban Wildlife are shown at half size below, and an animated version is available to simulate the process of turning the pages in the book. -- Alison King, February, 2002

 [ view the animated version here ]

©1994, 2002 A. King, all rights reserved

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