When it comes to artistic ability, animals are anything but a blank canvas. These 8 amazing artistic animals not only show interest in the process of creating art, their finished work ranks with more than a few human abstract artists.
Stable Work
Meet Metro Meteor, retired racehorse and inspired artist! Featured on The Today Show this past April 9th, the stalwart stallion who won nearly $300,000 over 27 lifetime starts now spends his days painting up a storm. His second career may eventually supersede his first if measured by financial success: to date Metro’s paintings have brought in $20,000 and there’s a waiting list for at least 50 more.
Bad knees forced Metro Meteor to retire from racing and trail riding, which got his owner wondering what to do next. “I am an artist so I thought if I could teach him to paint, we can still spend our days together, only we will be making art,” explained owner Ron Krajewski. “It took some time and patience but once he understood what I was asking he got into it and surprisingly he is really good.” Of course, of course!
The Creative Pouch
Native to the Huon Peninsula of North Eastern New Guinea, most people have never seen the endangered Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo… and of those, only a small fraction have seen one paint. “One” is the keyword here, being that Patty the painting Tree Kangaroo resides at Zoo Miami. Tree Kangaroos use there dexterous front paws to grip small branches when feeding so it wasn’t much of a stretch to induce Patty to nibble peanut butter off one end of a paintbrush while zookeeper Matthew Marsicano holds the paint-loaded other end against a sheet of paper. Laugh if you like but several of Patty’s paintings have already been sold.
Trunk Lines
Elephants can learn to paint abstract works, though they usually repeat the same style and colors each time. Naturally, they hold paintbrushes with their prehensile trunks and not their comparatively inflexible paws.
Elephants like Ramona, resident at an elephant sanctuary in Bali, Indonesia, have shown flashes of creativity that in themselves are more remarkable than the semi-abstract paintings they produce. Does the colorful image above purport to be a self-portrait, created on Ramona’s own initiative, or does the human mind simply “see” what it wants to see?
