Through art, we are given new ways to look at reality — it serves as a kind-of filter. Here, LWren beautifully captures a coyote in all the glory of fall colors which in reality serve as camouflage for them . For more, visit her website at https://www.wrendreams.com/

LWren Walraven has been painting mostly animals for over 20 years. Only recently has she begun to incorporate abstract principles into her celebrations of wildlife. Before then she created graphic, illustrative animal paintings that have been used commercially from logos to images for promotional materials. She is thoroughly enjoying her art journey as it evolves and changes.

This painting was inspired by a beautiful photograph of a coyote with her nose in the air by Janet Kessler.

Introduction: Artist Helen Tseng and I are both absorbed and intrigued by coyotes: it is because of this that we met. Not only have the coyotes themselves inspired her art, but she excitedly told me that she also has been inspired by my photos, some of which she has used as starting points for her own drawings. Hers are thoughtful creations, so please be sure to spend time reflecting on them and on her text: her simple outline art captures coyote movements and charm, and then she dives deeper into questions of her own (and our?) identity and her (our) place in the cosmos and on the globe where our success and expansion as a species has decimated so much of everything else.  

Coyote portals

Here’s an enchanting artistic piece from France and in French! A Gary Snyder poem has been rendered in French, recited, and set to images in a video as “visual poetry”, or kinépoèmes, as Deylan Caylon calls these.  Beautifully and minimally, it captures and conveys a fleeting impressionistic winter scene at the edge of the forest — the frontier between two separate worlds coming together for one brief instant. For me, the multimedia was all-encompassing: I felt that I was there, that the experience was mine. As with all poems, leave time to contemplate and immerse yourself in the moment. :))

Deylan Caylon wanted his work to be in step with my approach, as well as with that of Gary Snyder’s: “It was difficult for me to find one of his poems that could fit with a visual & musical construction of mine. When I found this one, I thought, ‘Yes, that’s the good one, but only if Janet agrees to give me some photos.'”

*A lisière is an edge or border, of a garden or forest or road or river, planted or where plants change from the type on one side to the type on the other — connotations of change, of frontier. For more about Deylan Caylon’s work visit his website: https://www.lisiere.com/

(click for larger PDF version)

Levi Wood, a student at Monarch High School in Louisville, Colorado contacted me a while back to use one of my images for his student produced magazine, The Howler.  It was a class project with Levi as the editor-in-chief. I was pleased that he chose this very fluid, twisted, almost corkscrew image, and even more impressed with how he used it, and morphed it into a table of contents. The final result is innovative, imaginative and eye-catching, yet clear and straightforward. Nice you all! And kudos to the class!

Hello Janet!

I wanted to give you the final product of the image as it will look in our magazine to give you some more context. We just finished the magazine this week. I have attached a pdf of the table of contents with your image.

The image is pretty self-explanatory, but essentially we are using the coyote as a frame for the preview images for each story, and each page number is listed to the right of the graphic. The staff list and everyone else in the class who helped produce the magazine is on the left page along with our mission statement. We wanted to do something really different but cool for the table of contents, and when we were looking for images of coyotes we stumbled upon your beautiful pictures and knew they would be perfect.

Thank you so much for allowing us to use your images, they really add a lot to the magazine and we would be happy to send you a copy of the issue! If you have any questions let me know.

Thank you

Cityrise

The city rises
Safe-haven for coyotes
Attenborough says

At 91 he should know
He saw cities burning
shattered

But now they rise again
and go global and digital
and within them are rats

Rats are food, for many,
for natives, for immigrants
for visitors, whether they arrive,
by land or sea or air
for coyotes, salmon, raptors

The dangers out-there
once plagued humans
and cities have plagues

but they also have food
and warmth and shelter
and healthcare
and people who love them,
like you —

So welcome to the city
Stadluft macht frei
the old saying said
and now let us all, together, have trees

You and the coyotes are on the leading-edge — the bleeding-edge, it’s sometimes called… — of the future, in Global Cities, according to David Attenborough, in a BBC series Planet Earth, the section of which he calls The Earth —

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_II (2016)

— see the original best via Netflix, with him narrating, Section 6, “E1S6” —-

He is the David Attenborough, now age 91, of “Gandhi” & much other TV and Movies fame… He feels city-expansion has created safe-havens and food-sources attracting wild animals, and that now one of the greatest challenges, for both them and humans, is that both can live together either in harmony or as enemies — for each needs the other, he says…

I’d add only that there is a 3rd factor, needed as well by both the other 2: trees…

[Don’t poison them]

In 2012, I visited New York City for the first time. I was going there to accept a rather prestigious award from The Dog Writers Association of American (yes, there really is such a thing) for my children’s novel, A DOG’S WAY HOME. The week before I left, I saw a story on national news about a young coyote being chased through the streets of downtown Manhattan by the police and animal control. What in the world, I wondered, was a coyote doing in New York City?

I live high in the mountains of Park City, Utah. Moose, deer, mountain lions, fox, and coyotes are not uncommon sights here. And like my wild neighbors, I am most comfortable in the woods, on a trail, away from people, cars, and the incessant noise of a city. Like, I imagined, that coyote in New York City.

During the four days I spent in Manhattan, I explored the city. I’d never seen buildings so tall. I was both amazed and distressed by the way they cut the endless sky into thin slivers. The sounds and smells of the city overwhelmed my senses, and yet, I was always curious about what was just around that next corner. As I explored the city, that young coyote was my shadow. I saw everything through its eyes: the stone canyons of skyscrapers, the people with their cell phones, the beauty of Central Park. By the time I got back on the plane to return to the mountains, I had the story that would become A PUP NAMED TROUBLE nestled in my heart.

I wrote two other children’s novels—THE DOGS OF WINTER and LUCKY STRIKE—over the next six years, but I never forgot about that coyote in New York City. In my other life, I’m a librarian. I love doing research. During those years, I read everything I could about urban coyotes. I learned that coyotes had made themselves quite at home in cities from Atlanta to Portland. I read with curiosity and deepening admiration the extent of their adaptability. When it came time to work on a new book, I knew exactly what I would write about.

In my new book, A PUP CALLED TROUBLE (Harpercollins/Katherine Tegen Books, Feb. 2018), a young coyote with an abundance of curiosity finds himself whisked away from his home in the wilds of New Jersey and, like Dorothy in THE WIZARD OF OZ, plunked down in a world he could never imagine: downtown New York City.  Using my memories of how I felt in NYC and the research I’d done, I created this young coyote’s own Oz, populated by Makers (humans), Beasts (cars), an evil “witch” (an animal control officer) intent on catching him, and friends—a crow, an opossum, a poodle, and an equally curious young girl—who help him find his way home.

My great, good hope is that readers of A PUP CALLED TROUBLE will come to appreciate that no matter where they live, whether in the mountains or the city, they have wild neighbors. And sharing their community with these critters is a privilege, not a threat or nuisance. Whether it’s a red-tailed hawk soaring above skyscrapers, an opossum ambling through the garden, or a coyote trotting along a street on a winter night, they can fill us with awe and wonder. Something we could all use a little more of.

[Please visit Bobbie Pyron’s website to learn more about her: www.bobbiepyron.com]

The Bernal Heights Outdoor Film Festival, which will be taking place here in San Francisco over the next several days, opened tonight. It included a short short video clip which I filmed and which Tod Elkins magically fixed up for the event with a title and music and amazing edits (including adjusting color, creating transitions, taking out the jiggle and the wobble, cutting out sections where the coyote ran out of the picture frame, and much more). Tod is a filmmaker, and I take raw footage, so we made this a joint project for the festival. Thank you, Tod! And thank you Leslie and Anne for inviting us to participate! Coyote is the mascot of the neighborhood so it had to be included, no matter how simple the clip, and I happen to have many clips! Leslie and Anne picked this one.

This opening-day event was warm and welcoming: the Master of Ceremonies, Ian Williams, was amusing and lots of fun. There was live music by a Chinese harp player with her Cajon drummer (a cajon is a square, wooden drum), an amazing dancer, and the food was beautifully presented and delicious.

Kudos to Leslie Lombre and Anne Batmale who organized the event: it’s the 14th season that they have done so. Of course it was the films themselves that carried the show: each one was creative and impactful in its own way: most were enhanced with music and no words! Each creation lasted on the average of about five minutes, with its focus stemming from each filmmaker’s unique individual experiences or take on life situations. I was very inspired. The festival continues for several days, so be sure to go!

For more information on the Film Festival, go to: Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema.

Here is a wooden sculpted coyote from the Museo de Artes Populares, in Mexico City.

In Aztec mythology, coyote — often referred to as huehuecoyotle — is the lucky god of music, dance, mischief and song. The prefix “huehue” was attached to gods that were revered for their old age, wisdom, philosophical insights and connections to the divine. Coyote can be associated with indulgence, male sexuality, good luck and story-telling.

Coyote is also a benign prankster, whose tricks tended to backfire and cause more trouble for himself than for the intended victims. A great party-giver, he also was alleged to foment wars between humans to relieve his boredom. He has shapeshifting powers. (Wikipedia)

I hope everyone sees that the Pre-Colombian storyteller possessed amazing wisdom and philosophical insights, into both coyotes and human nature, insights which hold true even today. Coyote is STILL fomenting wars between us humans: just visit your Nextdoor site to see the fights and disagreements about coyotes: coyotes’ shapeshifting powers continue to influence how different humans see this critter! And, of course, we all associate the howling-song-dog with song and sometimes mischief: did you ever wonder who cut through your garden hose last night?! Now the coyote is in trouble again — he has created more trouble for himself! As for good luck, any number of runners and walkers in the parks have told me that seeing a coyote in the park is their good-luck charm for the day. Pretty cool! Photo credits: Audrey Chavez and Nicole Wendel from their recent trip to Mexico City.

Here are four art pieces from the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City:

Lee Cline has painted some gorgeous portraits of coyotes which can be seen at the Four Barrel Cafe at 375 Valencia Street in San Francisco. The large canvases (36″x 48″), in oil and charcoal, capture coyote’s movements, essence and form — wispy and almost not there, the way you might encounter one on the street at twilight out of the corner of your eye before it disappears and you wonder if, in fact, you actually saw it — in an almost monochrome palette, with just a hint of subdued color in each painting for accent.

Lee says about herself: “I didn’t go to art school. But I like to draw and I like to paint. Never more than now, with all this digitalization of experience, this feels like the authentic thing: the hand-drawn, the dirty hands, the working and re-working in a world where there is no Undo.” I’m on the same page! I think her art is exquisite! And, of course, she paints a subject I’m passionate about. For more of her art, visit leecline.com

NO(w)HERE, Exhibition installation, Tempe Center for the Arts, 2013

“Animals disappear: some literally, in the wake of human expansion, some metaphorically, becoming ubiquitous and fading into the urban landscape.

My suburban upbringing was filled with mediated representations of the animal: literature, television, and corporate branding.  While the feeling of attachment to wildlife was authentic, the wildlife itself was artificial.  Even an encounter with a living, breathing animal is bound by unseen regulation.  Populations are controlled, predators are decimated, and survivors are displaced to the edge of human comfortability.  Boundary lines are drawn and animals are expected to obey, an obedience whose subversion is punishable by death.  The destabilization of wildlife systems due to urban sprawl is concealed under the banner of “progress”.

These realizations are the foundation for my exploration as an artist.  As society continues to redefine nature, I explore alternative systems of human/animal interaction through interdisciplinary processes: Juxtaposing animal imagery with human spaces and subverting traditional ways of observing non-humans in contemporary human networks.  By composing simulated encounters I enter into the dialogue of anti-confinement, animal autonomy, and the uncertain future of cohabitation.”

http://www.laurenstrohacker.org/statement/

In order to reach more folks, we are expanding our educational and informational efforts about coyotes and coexistence through various forms of art and cultural events. Here is our latest! Thank you all “Coexisters” at CoyoteCoexistence.com, and Sandra and Mike at the Mask Theater!

Gateway Performance Productions, a mask and theater group in Atlanta, has teamed up with us at CoyoteCoexistence.com to promote awareness and understanding of urban coyotes and how to live cooperatively with them in Atlanta and beyond.

Their production, Call of the Coyote, with coyote host Michael Hickey, is a short outdoors performance that includes audience interaction, storytelling and music. Educational information flyers about coyotes is provided by CoyoteCoexistence for distribution at the performance.

Call of the Coyote premiered this past Saturday, July 26, 2014 at the Freedom Farmers’ Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta and returns to the Market on Saturday, September 27th, 2014 with rotating performances from 9 a.m. until 11 a.m.

If you’re interested in scheduling a performance for your farmers market, festival or other event in the Atlanta area – please contact Cathy Hudson at Coyote Coexistence – cathyhudson@gmail.com or Sandra Hughes at Gateway Performance Productions – sandra@masktheatre.org

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[This program – a community partnership between Gateway Performance Productions and Coyote Coexistence – is made possible in part by the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, the Fulton County Commissioners with the guidance of the Fulton County Arts Council, Power2Give and individual contributors.] Reposted from CoyoteCoexistence.com with permission.