oil on two 30×50 canvases – 2015-2019
I have several fursonas, and my wife has one too.
My main fursona is a male reindeer named just Reindeer. He is more or less an ideal version of myself – ideal in that he’s more self-confident, more productive, and more accomplished as an artist.
My wife’s fursona is a female Iberian wolf named Leto, who loves most of all swimming, reading, cats, and Japanese culture. Ever since I chose the reindeer as my representative animal I always suspected I’d end up marrying a wolf. It’s the perfect match.
My other fursonas were created at pivotal moments in my life and represent more specific sides of my personality. They are also quite old at this point, hailing from the time before I began painting, and in fact I don’t have recent pictures of them apart from “Homecoming“. I will most likely paint each of them again at some point, but I’m not in a hurry. As I noted in the Furry Art page (and further elaborated in my Art Book), fursonas are extremely personal characters – so personal that furry artists don’t depict their own fursonas carelessly and may choose not to share pictures of them at all.
LETO’S FIRST PREGNANCY
In 2021 Leto became pregnant with our first child and I documented various stages of pregnancy, starting from the 4th month, with drawings based on live sketches of my wife (and, for the last drawing, our baby).
It’s fun to think that drawings like these would have been unthinkable for me when I started doodling furry art in 1996. Back then there were very few (if any) furry pictures based on live studies. Furry art of the 80s and 90s was all about drawing from the mind and appropriating cartoon/comic/anime characters that in turn had been mostly constructed from the mind. Most importantly, even when furry art was used to express intensely personal feelings, everybody kind of assumed it had to be kept separate from other aspects of life. The very idea that somebody could model for furry art would have sounded bizarre back then. Why would anyone want that? The then new concept of fursona was seen by most furries as going too far and taking personal fantasies too seriously. Furry wasn’t supposed to be about reality.
Of course there are many fantasies that shouldn’t be brought anywhere near real life and real people, but furry art always was an immensely powerful tool with the potential to capture the most down to earth moments of life. That much was clear to me since the very first time I browsed a major furry art archive. Maybe nobody was doing that yet, maybe the result would never be called great art and would only resonate with a selected few, but the potential was there.
With time many artists realized that potential. I love the feeling of vintage furry art, but when I browse my (pretty huge) collection of furry art from the 90s and 2000s I find most of it very impersonal, staging impossible fantasies and describing ideal characters way detached from real life. Nowadays instead there’s plenty of furry art portraying real life events and real feelings between real people. It’s this evolution that made furry art as a whole more grounded and more interesting to people who don’t care about the geeky stuff.
LETO’S SECOND PREGNANCY
Regrettably I haven’t completed drawings of each stage this time due to a combination of art burnout and being overwhelmingly busy with moving to a new home, but still I did sketches and I managed to turn the best ones into full fledged drawings.
MISCELLANEOUS
Section in progress. Various works that have a deep personal meaning to me.
