Please see several photo details of this 60 inch x 36 inch oil painting and the story of it's creation.

The Connectivity-of-everything is a concept that permeates all my thinking, so it is inevitable that it should make its way into my work. Also, Whale beings attract my attention and I have been in the water with wild ones many times while sea kayaking and swimming with them in several wild places. I once wrote: ’My soul sings from the eye of the whale in the sea.’

When I was with Humpback Whales in a bay of the South Pacific Island Vava’u, Tonga, I heard their long succession of calls or ‘singing’. Many of the sounds are identical to those that Elephants make. As it turns out, the DNA of Humpbacks is closer to Elephant’s than it is to some other marine mammals. Truly! As I worked on this painting I listened to recordings of Humpbacks and was surprised every time the Elephant sounds came over the speaker, even though I knew that it was actually a Humpback.

Visions for my work come in a variety of ways and some come in very deliberate progressions, as this one did.

It started with glimpses of pieces of a painting at first, with no clue as to what the overall would be about. There is a massive hill in my mountain valley home where we hike and every time I passed along the base of it, looking up, the shape reminded me of a whale’s tail. In the Spring it is so lovely with wild flowers, Sage and lush grasses with birds flying around. I thought I should paint it but it wouldn’t make a complete design by itself.

Next, I kept seeing in my mind a vivid band of color with greens on the left and purples on the right; beautiful, but again, not enough to be an image by itself.

I also kept seeing another element: a circle of whale tails, which I was determined to use in a painting.

Finally on the very night that I had completed my previous work, the large oil called ‘REFUGE-Great Blue Heron’, as I lay my head down to go to sleep, the vision for this new piece came in quickly. It started at the bottom and shot straight up to the top. My original sketch in pencil captured all the pieces the next morning.

The next night my husband and I were watching a Public Television show on Africa. The scene changed to a large calm lake there and out of the middle rose a Whale tail, as I have seen in the ocean. Shocked I realized, no, this is Africa and the “tail” rose higher revealing an Elephant’s trunk and head. In that moment I knew the image had to be superimposed onto the central Whale tail in my piece.

I was also still stumped as to the significance of the band of green and purple colors, when next I saw a program on the Aurora Borealis. The rest, they say, is history.  Again, I tried to imply a subtle shape of a Whale’s tail in the depiction of the Aurora.

There you have the main characters in this piece, about the connectivity of life, this time through the point of view of Whales (and also a Grandfather fox who just showed up to be included too). At the bottom of the painting I felt the animals would like it if I stated a thought from their perspective: ‘We See You’. – G.P.L.