Chimp Sketch of the week #40

Equality and Individually Primate Paint Together

In preparation for the opening of my show tomorrow I have made this short film. Incase your not already aware based on my months of posting on the subject tomorrow in Florida my gallery show Equality and Individually opens. This is a group art show with myself and a group of chimps that live in a sanctuary in Florida. It includes five collaborative paintings that I did with the chimps and the show is designed to raise money and awareness for chimps that spent there lives in cages at medical laboratories and are now living a free life in sanctuary. This show has been a year in the making and it opens tomorrow I am so proud and thankful for my new friends at Save the chimps

Chimp Sketch of the Week #34

Anna

Painted in watercolor another sketch for my Show in May in Florida more on that soon

Chimp Sketch of the week #32

Kallie

This is another one I did for Save the Chimps I will be posting sketches of many of the Residents of Save the chimps in the next few months as I will be doing a gallery show with them this spring and I am currently working on sketches for that show.

Chimp Sketch of the Week #29

Charcoal #2 

This chimp is part of my on going experiment with Charcoal. This Chimp is available for you to by and take home. Click here to buy me

Chimp Sketch of the Week #28

Neil and HAM

The recent death of Neil Armstrong got me thinking mostly about the romanticism of mans accomplishments and determination. The journey into space and the landing on the moon was and will always be one of Mans greatest moments. But lets not forget that it was not only Man that lead to this achievement, so today as I pay tribute to Armstrong with a portrait I also pay tribute to HAM as a representative of all of the Chimps that gave their life to science and assisted in the ultimate landing on the moon. If it were not for these chimps the only Man to do a moonwalk would have been Michael Jackson.

The First Primate on the Moon

The First Primate in Space

Chimp Sketch of the Week #25

Pepper (RIP)

I logged on to facebook the other day and I saw a post that Pepper the chimp had passed away. Pepper was born in 1970 and spent her first 27 years in research, first at a Merck, Sharp & Dohme laboratory, followed by seven years at the Buckshire Corporation. When she became too strong to control, she was sent to the NYU Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP). Pepper spent some time in breeding, but was mostly used for research, including some 307 knockdowns, 36 punch liver biopsies, one open wedge liver biopsy, six cervical biopsies, 10 lymph node biopsies, and four bone marrow biopsies. In the lab, Pepper was plagued by fear and anxiety, and would rather starve herself than face an unpleasant situation. Luckily she spent the end of her life in Sanctuary at Fauna but unfortunately so many others do not.

I never met pepper of course but reading about her in the book The Chimps Fauna Sanctuary make me feel as if I did. It would be nice if everyone reading this post would go here and make a small donation to the Fauna Foundation in Peppers honor.

References:

http://www.releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/their-stories/pepper/

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A True Story of Resilience and Recovery by Andrew Westoll

Drawing based on photo by Frank Noelker


for a complete obituary of Pepper please click here 

shakespeare

This one was inspired by an article Eric Johnson wrote. I drew this one a year ago after reading it. We recently published them together at Scientific American. click here

Chimp Sketch of the Week #24

Toby

Toby is a chimp living at the Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary in Canada. No one is sure where Toby was born but he lived his first 24 years in a zoo in Quebec, taught to act as a human child, wear clothes and eat with utensils. He still likes to wear bracelets and sunglasses from time to time but he also shakes his head continuously as a sign of stress and anxiety. Life for Toby at Fauna is not always easy being a bit of an outsider due to coming to the sanctuary later then most and from a different situation. He has had a few altercations with the other chimps once having a finger bit clean off of his hand.

To read more about Toby and the other residents at Fauna you should read the Book The Chimps Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll and read my review of the book here www.thisviewoflife.com

Chimp Sketch of the Week #20

Charcoal sketch # 1

So I have not drawn with charcoal since art school, but I had a few sticks sitting in a draw so I had some fun, drew this and fell in love all over again with the medium. With this sketch I have started a sub series of Chimp Sketch of the Week that I will be putting in up periodically and also selling the originals HERE at a reasonable price 

Chimp Sketch of the Week #19

With a Little Help From My Kid

Last week I took my four-year-old daughter Lillian to see the Movie “Chimpanzee” after the movie I asked her to draw a portrait of the little protagonist chimp Oscar and I told her I would do the same.

Here she is doing her drawing

Here is her drawing of Oscar

Here is mine

Look for my complete review of the film soon

Chimp Sketch of The Week #18

TOM


Tom is the oldest chimp at the Fauna Sanctuary and the only one born in Africa, Tom is the chimp ambassador of project R&R. It is their mission to end the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research and to help provide them release and restitution in permanent sanctuary. During his life in testing laboratories Tom was purposely infected with HIV. 


read more in my complete illustrated book review of the Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary at www.thisviewoflife.com 

chimp Sketch of the week #17

My brief meeting with Jane Goodall

This week for chimp sketch of the week I decided that instead of drawing a Chimp I would do a drawing of a person who has done so much for chimps and humans alike.

I was lucky enough to see Jane Goodall speak last week here on Long Island at Adelphi University.  I showed up two hours early in anticipation of her speech I was alone...

but it filled up quick.

This picture is taken from the bottom of the bleachers there is another couple of hundred people behind me.

When she first came on to the stage the college girls and biology students behind me giggled and said how cool she was, just a few of the millions of people that Jane has inspired over the last fifty years. She spent the first half of her speech talking about her experiences with the chimps and even greeted us with sounds similar to that of the chimps in Gombi, I was in pure heaven. After discussing the obvious similarities between chimps and humans she sited the obvious difference as well, our ability for abstract thought. She then posed a question: "if humans are in fact the most intelligent creators on the planet how come we are destroying the only home we have." 

After the speech there was a book signing over one thousand people got there books signed I was among the first one hundred but by the time I got to Jane I had about thirty seconds to get a copy of her book signed, tell her that she was a huge inspiration in my life, give her a copy of my book The Chimpanzee Manifesto and tell her it was an honor to hear her speak. 

I wanted to tell her that I was an artist and that I fell in love with chimps watching her program as a kid. I wanted to tell her that I was working on a series of portraits to try to help a Chimp Sanctuary in Florida and was hoping for a nod of approval. I wanted to ask if I could use my art to assist The Jane Goodall Institute and her in her global effort to help the chimps but there just was not enough time.  My meeting with Jane Goodall was brief but wonderful.  

Chimp Sketch of the week #2

One Day late HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!