They Were Never Just Animals
Why I paint animals. Not the decorative answer. The real one.
I never had a doll phase.
Other kids had them. I had animals. Figurines mostly, the small plastic ones you could line up on a windowsill and give entire civilisations to. I don’t know when it started because there’s no before to point to. We had animals in the house. I felt more comfortable near them than near most people. That’s just always been the situation.
There’s a thing that used to happen when I was small that I’ve never managed to describe properly. I’d be watching an animal (just watching, not doing anything) and something would shift. Like a perspective slip. And for a moment I wasn’t watching it, I was somehow seeing from it. Not imagining what it would be like. Actually briefly occupying a different vantage point.
I know how that sounds. I’m telling you anyway.
I don’t eat animals or wear them. This isn’t something I decided. It’s more like something I noticed about myself early enough that there was never really a decision to make. The idea of harm coming to them has always sat in my body the same way, like something structurally wrong, not like a preference.
I say this because people sometimes ask why animals, why always animals, and I think they’re expecting an artistic answer. A thing about symbolism or visual language or the challenge of rendering fur. And those answers exist and they’re true, but they’re not the real one.
The real one is that I have never experienced them as other. Not in the way the world seems to expect me to.
Every tradition that paid attention arrived at the same place
This is the part I find genuinely strange, in the best way.
Every ancient wisdom tradition, and I mean every one, across cultures that developed in complete isolation from each other, came to the same conclusion about animals. Not similar conclusions. The same one. They are teachers. They carry knowledge that human consciousness, in our particular configuration, isn’t built to access on its own.
The bee navigates by ultraviolet light. The snake shed its skin before the first mystic thought to use shedding as metaphor. It was already doing the thing. The koi in the Chinese legend doesn’t know it will become a dragon when it leaps the Dragon Gate. It swims because swimming is its nature. The transformation isn’t a reward. It’s just what complete persistence becomes.
I’ve spent a lot of time with these stories. They don’t feel like stories to me. They feel like field notes.
What unsettles me (in a way I find more interesting than unsettling, now) is the independence of it. These traditions didn’t compare notes. They arrived separately. That’s not mythology. That’s something being observed, repeatedly, by different people in different centuries who all looked long enough to see the same thing.
What I’m actually doing when I paint them
Not decoration. Not illustration. Not even, really, representation.
My paintings start not with a sketch but with something closer to reception. An image arrives with enough specificity that I know I’m not inventing it, and my job is to render it faithfully. The animals I paint exist somewhere. In worlds that run alongside this one. In skies that have never held a threat for them. Complete, luminous, and in possession of everything they were always meant to be.
I paint them there because I think that’s where they actually are, when we’re not looking.
And I paint them small (the bee, the squirrel, the rabbit, the snake) because these are the ones that cross our paths and disappear before we think to look properly. The ones we step over. The ones we have, for a long time now, failed to see.
Animarii is, in the most literal sense I can offer, an act of witness.
That’s why animals. That’s always been why.
Rebecca 🦋