title : tiger, tiger…
medium : oil on paper, wood support
dimensions : ummm … 2′ x 3′ approx.

Oh dear. This is not the title written on the back of the painting, sold last summer to a good friend. I am scouring my memory banks with no success, memories are scattered everywhere now … what a mess. I’m also guessing at the size again because that information is not lying about in here either. I begin to see how poorly organized this all must seem to the casual reader, just stopping by. You may be thinking; “No wonder artists so often die poor and starving in a garret.”

Sigh.

I can tell you it was painted in early 2001. It is the first in an infinite, ergo – unfinished series called The Disney Suite, assonance and dissonance in oil on paper.

I shall confess it. I went to Disney World, Florida compound, in the fall of 2000. The trip was a gift from my sister to my parents on the occassion of their fortieth wedding anniversary. My appearance at the US departures gate in the Ottawa International Airport, all expenses paid by my sister, came as a complete surprise to my parents whom I had not visited in two years.

My Dad saw me first. Bolting up out of the moulded plastic seating he asked, happy and perplexed; “Rob’! What are you doing here…?”

I smiled and hugged him and said; “Hi Dad! I’m on my way south to help out with Ralph Nader’s campaign for the presidency.”

“Oh, G-d. You’re not … ”

Poor Dad. Too large a part of him was afraid it was true. “No Dad, I’m not. I’m coming with you…!” Thus we embarked as a small, oddly compiled tribe, off to savour the decadent treacle of all that is Disney/all that has been sucked into the gaping Disney maw. I had struggled mightily with the horror of it all long before arriving on the hot Florida tarmac. I love my family and would never suggest my sister’s desire was anything less than to bring the family together and to celebrate together. I will not utter a word about their predilection for what I consider a fetid consumptive swamp fever of corporate evil. I know they don’t see it that way. They see cartoons, innocent entertainments and quality merchandising.

I see something different. I see the tenth circle of hell Dante could not bring himself to write about. I reasoned the only way to survive the environment itself was to go in data-mining, make art about it, tell the people what I saw. “I’m going to Disney world so that you don’t have to…” became my mottoe … unless you really want to of course, in which case you and I aren’t different exactly, we’re just on different planets.

This is a photo of the blessed tiger who was trapped and carted off to live in Disney’s resin-cast animal kingdom hell. I took it myself. I remember the day I wandered through animal kingdom hell very sharply, like a knife in the belly. I felt so powerfully ashamed of the depths which human beings casually sink to in order to amuse themselves. I wanted so much for the tigers to run free – and eat people.

I took photos of a silverback gorilla, similarly penned for Disney profit. I stood on the other side of thick glass, separating the 9-5 parade of our bloated human self indulgence from him and his family. The other gorillas that you could see were further up a slope and well away from the glass wall, paying us no mind, denying us our pre-paid close-up spectacle.

The silverback sat in one corner of the shaded arena with the built-in window, his back against one wall, staring at nothing, mere inches from the glass. He looked to me like a man in a pay-per-view jail cell, a man who knows he will never escape alive. His was the posture of the damned, the incarcerated spirit. My shame was ocean deep and ocean wide. I lifted my disposable camera for a picture, hardly able to swallow or breathe and slowly, slowly he turned his head. With boundless dignity he looked me in my eye. I hit the plastic button to release the plastic shutter, a sudden reflex-action, as though in response to being struck. I took the camera away from my face and tried to see him through my wall of shame. An instant later he looked away.

I compiled and self-published a very slim volume of poems in 2002 including one I wrote about my day in animal kingdom hell. It goes like this:

Overheard, November 2000

(a woman by the tiger-tank)

” They look just like stuffed animals …

soft and furry … ”

(two men by the gorilla-tank)

” They’re so human. ”

” It looks just like a person
waiting for a bus … or waiting
for his wife … [smiles] ”

” Heh, heh, yah;
What’s for dinner? “