Creative critters

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/03/2021 (1660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A young South African painter is taking the art world by storm, despite being a real swine.

Meet Pigcasso — a pig who was rescued from a slaughterhouse in 2016 and has gone on to hog the limelight as an internationally renowned porcine painter.

Now five years old and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 450 kilograms, this piggy painter’s remarkable flair for wielding a brush was highlighted this month in a viral video on the MSN web portal.

Pigcasso discovered a love for painting after being rescued as a piglet from an industrialized hog farming facility and taken to a new home at Farm Sanctuary SA just outside Cape Town, South Africa.

Joanne Lefson, who runs the animal sanctuary, says the painting began as a way of keeping Pigcasso entertained when she first arrived in the sanctuary’s barn.

“Pigs are very smart animals and so when I brought Pigcasso here to the barn I thought how do I keep her entertained?” Lefson said.

“We threw in some footballs, rugby balls and, of course, there were some paintbrushes lying around because the barn was newly built. She basically ate or destroyed everything except these paintbrushes. She loved them so much.”

Today, Pigcasso’s masterpieces typically fetch between $500 and $4,000. She uses a tailor-made brush and child-friendly, non-toxic paint to make her abstract artworks, which have raised more than $145,000 for the sanctuary.

This highly acclaimed piggy painter is in a menagerie of excellent company, as we see from today’s tasteful and non-human list of Five Famous Artistic Animals:

 

5) The animal artist: Koopa the turtle

The brush with fame: It was back in 2004 when Koopa first started making waves, which is not unusual for a Gulf Coast box turtle, but Koopa’s playground was a sea of paint instead of the ocean.

Artist Kira Varszegi took the turtle back to her Connecticut home after buying him from a pet shop in 2000. Varszegi, a turtle-loving artist, discovered her new pet’s creative talent by accident a couple of years later. “I was sitting on the floor, painting an abstract portrait on my tiny tabletop easel,” she told an assortment of newspapers at the time. ‘

“I got up to take a break and when I returned, there sat Koopa happily bathing in a sea of paint. After drying him off, I returned to my painting and was just amazed at how well blended the paints on my palette were. I knew I had to find a safe way for Koopa to paint and share his gift with the world.” The duo started working as a team, with Varszegi squeezing washable, non-toxic paint on a canvas and letting Koopa blend the colours with his legs and stomach just by walking. He was then carefully rinsed by his owner.

At his peak, Koopa, named after a Super Mario Brothers Nintendo game character, created up to three of his masterpieces a week, usually taking 20 minutes to complete each one. The paintings were sold on eBay with popular ones fetching as much as $480. According to the website turtlekiss.com: “Koopa has retired from painting, but he’s created 827 original paintings in his five-year career! Koopa’s paintings hang in all 50 U.S. states, as well as Canada, Bahrain, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy!”

His owner donated 20 per cent of Koopa’s sales to turtle conservation and rescue groups. He was a truly creative artist, though he never came out of his shell.

 

4) The animal artist: Lea and Max the sea lions

The brush with fame: Back in 2007, Jen DeGroot, a marine mammalogist at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, was looking for enrichment activities to keep her sea lion charges stimulated and challenged. According to multiple news reports at the time, DeGroot hit on a unique idea — teaching a pair of California sea lions, Lea a 20-year-old female, and Max, a 19-year-old male, to make flipper art.

“I worked at an aquarium where we had penguins doing foot prints,” DeGroot told the East Oregonian newspaper in 2009. “They walked on the canvas.” The mammalogist had worked with sea lions at other aquariums where they were trained to paint with a brush, but she’d never known a sea lion or any marine mammal to create flipper art. DeGroot explained the skill of pressing flipper to paper is a unique one for sea lions.

“To this day, I think we are the only people who have trained a sea lion to do a flipper print,” she said. “Each sea lion flipper has distinctive markings just like a human fingerprint and it’s really neat to see the detail in the print. It is pretty unique.” She never dreamed the aquarium’s “artists in residence” would develop a following, but that’s exactly what happened when fellow workers learned of the work and began requesting custom prints. Before long, DeGroot and her colleagues were having trouble keeping up with the demand.

“We thought, ‘This is a popular thing. We can make money for the animals,’” DeGroot said. The sea lion art was soon sailing off the shelves at the aquarium’s gift shop. “People are really impressed and after seeing this, they want to go back out and see the sea lions. It touches people who might not normally be animal appreciators,” manager Candy Torney said. Lea and Max are also featured artists in Tifane Grayce’s book, Fur in My Paint, which highlights enrichment programs for animals. In 2015, Lea was humanely euthanized following longstanding medical complications related to old age.

 

3) The animal artist: Mshindi the black rhino

The brush with fame: It’s never easy for an artist to make a big impression, but it helps if they weigh in at more than a ton. That was certainly the case with Mshindi, the 21-year-old black rhinoceros at the Denver Zoo who skyrocketed to fame as the only rhino in the world trained to paint with a brush.

Trainer Christine Bobko taught Mshindi to hold a paintbrush in his mouth and dance it over a canvas as part of an enrichment exercise to keep him challenged and occupied. Mshindi, whose name means “warrior” or “champion” in Swahili, was famously interested in learning new things. Many of Mshindi’s paintings were sold to benefit animal conservation groups, including rhino preserves in Africa.

According to the website of the Rhino Resource Centre: “Mshindi’s genius is not just a stroke of genius. The painting process is part of an extensive behavioural enrichment program developed in part by his primary keeper, Christine Bobko. Bobko has trained him through operant conditioning to conduct a variety of behaviours, including sitting on command, fetching a stick, standing still, backing up, sitting on a boomer ball, presenting his foot, and even presenting his ear for veterinary and keeper staff to draw blood.

The purpose of these behaviours is to stimulate him psychologically and acclimate the animal to interaction with his keeper in order to better serve his health.” Mshindi also made headlines in 2013 for — OUCH! — biting the finger of a woman during a meet-and-greet encounter. Mshindi, who had chronic painful foot problems, was euthanized in 2015 after he “lost his quality of life,” a post on the zoo’s Facebook page said.

 

2) The animal artist: Metro the racehorse

The brush with fame: You can lead a horse to an easel, but you can’t make him paint. Fortunately, a top-class racehorse named Metro Meteor was passionate about painting, and that artistic skill allowed him to save his own life.

According to the BBC, Metro won eight races and $300,000 in prize money at Belmont Park before being retired by his stable after bone chips in his knees caused permanent damage. Despite his severe health issues, Metro was adopted by artist Ron Krajewski and his wife Wendy.

“We were looking for a horse Wendy could ride and were probably quite naive,” Ron told the BBC. “We soon discovered Metro had worse race injuries than we had bargained for.” Despite extensive treatment, in 2012, vets gave Metro two years to live. His owners wanted to make him happy and noticed he liked bobbing his head up and down, so Ron, a professional artist, decided to give the horse a paintbrush.

“I taught him to touch his nose to the canvas for horse treats, then to hold a paint brush,” Ron recalled in 2017. “He could have just touched the paint brush to the canvas and then dropped it and that would have been the end of it. Luckily for us, he started making up and down strokes and seemed to enjoy it.”

He became the best-selling artist at Gallery 30 in Gettysburg, Penn., and made enough money to pay for a pioneering treatment for his knee condition — his vet created a technique to apply a drug directly to his knees. “Within a few months X-rays showed the bone growth had receded. It has added years to his life,” Ron said. “Metro has got a little section in the barn that we call his studio. It’s all set up ready for him to paint.”

Ron and Wendy donated half of Metro’s earnings to a charity that helps racehorses find good homes. In 2018, five years after his original prognosis, Metro’s health rapidly declined and the “heartbreaking decision” was made for him to be humanely euthanized at the age of 15.

 

1) The animal artist: Dagger DogVinci the black lab/golden retriever mix

The brush with fame: It would seem this famed canine artist wasn’t destined for a life of service. Before he was ever handed a paintbrush, Dagger was training to become an assistance dog for Canine Companions for Independence.

“During Dagger’s training, he learned how to push drawers and doors closed and hold objects in his mouth, but he was not able to fulfil his duties as an assistance dog because of his fear issues, so his life took a different turn,” the website DogVinci.com barks. That turn came when he was adopted by artist Yvonne Dagger on Long Island, N.Y. In the summer of 2015, Dagger was sitting in the studio and watching his owner when she asked whether he wanted to try his paw at painting.

“Yvonne placed a brush in his mouth and with one simple command, ‘paint,’ Dagger immediately went to work creating amazing artwork — where each and every stroke of paint on the canvas is placed by Dagger himself,” DogVinci.com states. Sporting his trademark red beret, the four-legged painter’s remarkable artistic skills have earned him celebrity status and appearances on news programs along with the Rachael Ray Show, Animal Planet, the Today Show and Inside Edition, to name just a few.

“Since the early spring of 2016, when Dagger’s story went viral, Dagger has sold over 650 paintings with a portion of all sales going to animal- and people-related charities and causes. Dagger has donated over $135,000 to date to charity,” the website howls. Dagger was nominated in 2017 for the American Humane Hero Dog Awards.

Along with his art career, Dagger is now a certified therapy dog. “Dagger goes to nursing homes, libraries and schools visiting the residents and children bringing love and comfort to everyone he meets,” the website gushes.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca