1. How It Started:
- This started after years of watching animals die via vehicle collision and the owners of vehicles were never held accountable and the animal was often left there to rot on the roadside without any proper burial or consideration.
2. How I Determined the Narrative Focus:
- I spent months planning, shooting photos of roadkill and 3 years driving the state from Fresno to the Bay and Fresno to San Diego observing patterns of human behavior regading animals killed by cars, coupled with seeing this play out in my own community year over year for 20 years.
3. So the questions became:
- How do I convey the message that people need to see the animals as important as people?
- How do I make people engage with a dead animal on paper?
- How do I create a work that tells a narrative while at the same time forces the people to consider their actions?
- ***I also knew I had to try some new elements in this work, and I was not sure how to render that? (i.e. the upside down transition to Heaven; the asphalt and a car speeding away)
4. How it Became a Drawing:
- I was able to narrow down that the best animal was a kitten. Older animals that die this way are not pretty or can be very damaged, and people would not look at that.
- I knew I wanted a comment on Waymo & Tesla after the Waymo killed a well-known and loved cat and a Tesla hit a Sherrif vehicle.
- The clouds would be a new attempt to expand my style off of the reproductive rights storm clouds.
- The ground would break forward through the frame/border to bring you up close to the cat.
The Challenges:
- The upside down image not being lost in the existing sky/clouds
- Creating the image of asphalt and a black cat where the cat is discernible.
- Perspective of the car and tire marks in the wet road (figuring out how to let go of perspective and what would be “real” and in size for the sake of the image.
- Creating a new way of doing storm clouds
JMBaRt - Fine Art & Printmaking by Jared Barbick 