The Lion's Roar

Saturday morning — early — we had a team of artists at the Bronx Zoo painting the runners and supporters for this spring’s Run For The Wild event. There were 6,000 participants, running to support Wildlife Conservation Society efforts. At the event, they announced that over the past few decades the number of lions in the wind have declined by 80%, and even these most iconic of all the big cats are in danger of disappearing from the wild. Please go to Run For The Wild to see what you can do.

All we painted on people were lion faces. Even so, our goal is to be creative and make every face unique. We had a couple of trainees along on the event, and the advice I gave them to encourage freedom in their approach to their face designs was: “we are not trying to make people into lions, we are painting onto them a lion mask. So we are not trying to make the lion realistic, we are creating a work of art that captures the essence of the lion, that feels like a lion, that makes the viewer think ‘lion'”. Facepainting is an art, so nature is not meant to be imitated or reproduced—it is meant to be re-created through the vision of the artist.

The Lion gets Loose

[caption id=”attachment_2448″ align=”alignleft” width=”193″ caption=”Lion Growl  Continue reading →