Strength For When the Wolves Come

Why wolves, you might ask? Well five separate things led me to make this piece.

1. The biggest factor was my fairly recent encounter with a wolf while on my mountain bike in the Wood River Valley in November. It crossed the path in front of me, stopped and looked at me and then wandered off into the sage brush. I tried to look to see where it had gone but it just seemed to disappear into the landscape, which was fine by me!  I was not sure if what I saw was a wolf or a coyote and engaged my friend Marianne who asked me a bunch of good questions about the size of the animal as compared to her huge dogs. We figured it must have been a coyote until I saw this newspaper article with the photo and then I KNEW that a wolf is what crossed my path!

2. Next up was this headline I came across in Ironman Magazine, whom my high school friend Steve is the editor:  "Strength for When the Wolves Come" really caught my attention as these words reminded me of a childhood memory. One night I was awakened by my grandmother having a nightmare and she was talking in her sleep. She was shouting to be careful as there were wolves in the house.  We lived in a suburb in New Jersey right outside of  NYC, so this was highly unlikely.  Well my little sister was woken up by my grandmother who was talking in her sleep but my sister didn't know she was talking in her sleep and assumed it was real and wanted to know where they were! We all got a laugh out of this the next morning but that night it seemed all too real!

3. The cool silver wolf pin someone gave me to use in a piece of art. 

4.  The the current controversial issue of the reintroduction of wolves in the state of Idaho and the lifting of their protected status.

 

5.  And the tipping point was finding the wolf statue last week.

 

This past week I bought this wolf statue at a thrift store in Ketchum. I already had the newspaper article and magazine cut out saved along with the wolf pin which was given to me.  I was saving these items to use on a future piece...with the find of the statue, I felt that I had enough items to start.

When I have an idea of what I want to make and it is something based on a letter, I dig out my plastic bags of letters and see what I have that I can use to complete the piece. I found several "w" game pieces and a wolf card.

I had a shadow box given to me by a friend that I decided to use for this project. I painted a mountain scene on the top, glued the pin and letters and then added paint to distress the pieces.

I painted and collaged all  4 sides and the back of the inside of the box. I then glued the statue and some silk leaves in the bottom. Unfortunately the glass does not come out of the box and it is very hard to photograph something with a glass front. 

The right side of the box...

and the left side.