Teresa (Terry) Ann Jackson is an Australian wildlife artist who practices her craft in pastel, colored pencil, and graphite. She creates the most dazzling, photorealistic images that are real enough to touch. One such graphite painting (as she calls it), caught my attention called Tusk. It is an elephant. But not just simply an elephant, but a face-to-face portrait with one of the most hunted and intelligent mammals on the planet.
Tusk is a portrait of an elephant, of which few outside the zoo get to see. The image crops out most of the body and focuses on the right eye, the lower cheek, and ivory tusk of the great African elephant. These animals are an endangered species, the population estimated to be between 470,000 and 690,000 individuals, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.
Ms. Jackson’s composition is realistic with an abstract quality. The enormous elephant fills the composition so entirely that only the right side if its face and tusk are visible. The right tusk stretches out of the image, white and pure, grabbing the attention of the viewer, as a white beacon on a gray, wrinkly expanse. The white tusk is balanced with the dark shadow created by a fold of skin on its upper chest.
Ms. Jackson’s rendering of Tusk is what artists call monochromatic, meaning shades and tints of a single color, namely white. Tusk not only is a portrait of the largest land animal on the planet, but it is also a value scale that begins with the dark black of the shadow located in the lower right, and stretches over a mass of dark grays flanked by the light gray ear and cheek. Then the medium grays that form the left side of the image gradually move toward lighter grays that eventually wrap around to the mighty white tusk.
African elephants were declared an endangered species in 1989 due to mass slaughter and execution for their ivory tusks, which have been made into everything from jewelry to piano keys. Although they are a protected species, the illegal ivory trade puts money in the pockets of those unscrupulous individuals willing to get shot by park rangers who protect the mighty animals. Teresa Ann Jackson calls the viewer to attention with the following blurb about elephants:
The harvest of elephants, both legal and illegal, has had some unexpected consequences on elephant anatomy as well. African ivory hunters, by killing only tusked elephants, have given a much larger chance of mating to elephants with small tusks or no tusks at all. The propagation of the absent-tusk gene has resulted in the birth of large numbers of tuskless elephants, now approaching 30% in some populations (compare with a rate of about 1% in 1930). Tusklessness, once a very rare genetic abnormality, has become a widespread hereditary trait.
Teresa Ann Jackson is a wildlife artist who lives and works in Australia. She is a mother of three grown children and a lover of animals. She began drawing portraits of people she knew after her children were grown. She moved toward drawing animals after a chance encounter with a limited edition lion print for Christmas. She found a passion for drawing wild animals and continues to this day, populating her website, Drawn Wild.com with black and white along with color portraits of big cats, great apes, kangaroos, wolves, and more!
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