Dogs

 “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” ― Will Rogers

I once did a color sketch many years ago of a pair of working chocolate Labrador Retrievers (see drawing below) for some friends in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This type of sketching is pretty meaningful for me. I think that I may actually enjoy doing drawings of peoples’ passionate activities involving animals and/or their pets more than any other type of artistic work. I have learned to appreciate how much people share and celebrate such incredible attachments to their passions that involve animals and their pets. Deep engagement, love, and affection. This goes for sporting dogs, lap dogs, rescued dogs, show dogs, cats of high-breeding or just barn-dwelling felines, birds, chickens, ducks, cows, potbellied pigs, fish and any of the many other creatures you can possibly think of. I even had a colleague I once worked with who if I remember right kept some rather large clicking cockroaches and a giant centipede in aquariums at the office where she and I worked. 

To be able to use art as a way of bringing memories to life through a pets likeness for those humans is truly delightful. I have even tackled a drawing of a beloved pet dog that was transferred to and engraved on an Aunt’s tombstone. A likeness of a beloved canine enshrined in polished granite in a rural Michigan cemetery. That is just an example of not only how much my aunt had cared for her dog but how very much the family knew that she loved that dog, to commission this memorial art to that love. It was my honor to do it. It was a monument to her love and character from her loved ones.

American wildlife photographer, writer, wildlife preservationist, and television personality Roger Caras wrote that “If you don’t own a dog, at least one, there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.” And as someone who has had many dogs present as family members his whole life, I did not realize there was “something wrong” with my life during the last few years I was without a dog. Now I will stop writing and go play with the puppy that my wife and I are fixing our “something wrong” feeling with.