The Elephant in the Room

The elephant occupies almost the entire page, towering over a seated figure who appears to be conducting a perfectly normal conversation with several tons of unresolved symbolism. Inside the elephant: tiny people, water, a lone boat. Because apparently being metaphorical wasn’t enough.

The image works through scale. Make one thing enormous and everything around it suddenly becomes vulnerable, comic, sacred, or absurd. Artists have used exaggerated scale for centuries to show importance and power. Here, the elephant grows so large that it stops feeling like an animal and starts behaving like an idea.

Calder comes to mind in the playful economy of the animal form, Matisse in the bold black silhouette, and Steinberg in the way a simple drawing becomes a whole little philosophical machine.

The rough brush texture keeps the black shape from becoming flat. It feels rubbed, dragged, inhabited.

So yes, there’s a decent chance this one knows exactly what he represents. He also brought his own lake.