This still-life gave me a new appreciation for the American Buffalo.
The bison skull used as a model in this painting was borrowed from a local blacksmith. It so happened that the skull was the very first bison skull I ever had close contact with. Lifting it was in itself a workout, heavy and unwieldy as an unbalanced kettlebell. The physical act of heaving the skull out of my vehicle and up the stairs into my studio gave me an entirely knew appreciation for the animal — only a creature of incredible strength and solid construction could live with such an immense skull stuck to the apex of its spine. This wasn’t something that I hadn’t already known, but it’s one thing to have the intellectual awareness of the bison’s size and power… it’s something completely different to come to that realization in a physical sense, to suddenly come to a visceral understanding in the grounded fibers of your being that this creature could stamp you into dust and particulate with little to no effort.
One of the more interesting aspects of this particular skull was the fact that it had only one horn. The other had gone missing and only the bony protrusion remained. It gave the skull an eye-catching asymmetry. Between that and the incredible texture of the bone, it made for one fascinating subject. I knew I wanted to make a painting featuring the skull, but struggled to come up with a composition that expressed the things I wanted to express. I toyed with placing it within a bed of geometric patterns much like some of the bone illustrations I produced in the past, but whatever I did, it didn’t seem correct. Finally I realized the skull itself was exactly the striking statement I was looking for. There, on its own, centered in the canvas, with its one horn reaching towards the corner like the curved blade of some dark scimitar, it said all it needed to say. It was all it needed to be.
Writer and outdoorsman Steven Rinella said of the bison,
“At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it’s a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it’s a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
‘Single Horn’ strives to capture this same sentiment, but through the magic of pigment.