Australian Reptile Park

I'm not 100% sure that it's totally art-related, but I had to share these photos from the Australian Reptile Park because it was such a unique experience.

Above, that's not a dog. It's a dingo.  According to most of the Australians I talked to the whole "a dingo ate my baby" is spectacularly rare and mostly unheard of.  It's part of the reason that nobody believed Lindy Chamberlain.  However, while we were in Australia, there was a report of a toddler being attacked by a dingo until her parents intervened.  It definitely made me stay away from this dingo.

The top two photos contain real turtles and a fake crocodile. In the rest of the photos, the croc is alive and far away from me.  ;)

Petting a kangaroo has to be one of the major highlights of my Australian trip.  I've always had a fear of petting zoos, so actually petting the kangaroo was kind of a big deal for lots of reasons!

Above was the only koala that was awake.  Not unusual.  Koalas sleep 20 hours every day!

The spiders in the trees were bigger than any I've ever seen.  And my understanding is that I missed some of the truly large spiders of Australia...thank goodness!

I've been holding these photos for several months wondering whether or not to post them.  I try to keep things very art-focused around here.  But then I decided that part of creating art is about drawing inspiration from the things we see.  I know that I've never seen animals like these and if you're not an Aussie, it's possible that you haven't either. 

Some possible artistic inspiration:

• The color combo I'm wearing: purple and red.  I like it!  (Obviously.)
• Crocodile scales -- what a great stencil or stamp that would be!
• The Eucalyptus trees are so beautiful and would be fun to memorialize in paint.
• The brown tones in the kangaroo's fur.  A lot of people think of Brown as an "ugly" color, but I think it's worth exploring and exploiting.
• Scale.  The giant Galapagos Tortoise.  The enormous spider.  The tiny turtles.  I've been thinking a lot about scale in my work lately.  Not only the scale of the work itself, but the scale of the objects within the work.  A giant eye or a tiny hand, etc.  Scale that is abnormal tends to delight and excite most people.
• How about the patterns on the entry gate?  Those would make for cool doodles.

What do you see that inspires you artistically?

Thanks for stopping by!