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Artist Sue Buck and the orangutan Knobi watch each other intently during collaboration on an acrylic painting at Great Ape Trust. Knobi was attentive to the process for several hours over a period of several days, which reinforced for Buck the orangutan characteristic of patience.
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Des Moines, Iowa – April 17, 2008 – Pennsylvania artist Sue Buck left Great Ape Trust of Iowa, which describes its scientific inquiry as “insights through collaborations with apes,” with some revelations of her own after collaborating on a half-dozen paintings with the orangutan Knobi and bonobo Panbanisha. Among her insights, Buck said, is that the line dividing human and non-human artists is shadow-thin.
Artistic collaborations with the apes were an unexpected luxury for Buck, a resident of Guys Mill, Pa., and an art professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. Her relationship with Great Ape Trust began early in The Trust’s six-year history, when she was commissioned to create pastel chalk drawings of Azy and Knobi, both orangutans, and bonobos Kanzi, Panbanisha and later, P-Suke, also a bonobo who was the father of many of The Trust’s youngest ape residents. The Trust recently commissioned two more of Buck’s pastels, these to be drawn of bonobo Nyota and orangutan Allie.
The half-dozen paintings Buck worked on with Knobi represented the artist’s first-ever collaboration with animals, though she has made art cooperatively with humans on occasion. “You never know what will happen with people, either,” Buck remarked, then corrected herself: “Actually, they’re the same. There’s really no difference.”
The nearly invisible parallels between human and ape artists were subtle in Buck’s collaborations with Knobi, but distinctly pronounced in her sessions with Panbanisha, a more experienced artist. Great Ape Trust’s resident orangutans are relatively new to painting, but the bonobos have grown up with it as an enrichment activity, which Buck thinks may explain some of the differences in their techniques. Regardless of their level of experience, they appear to enjoy it, which Buck believes should be the goal in any artistic endeavor.
“The whole point of doing this is to keep their lives interesting, to give them something to do,” she said. “Art-making is a great way to enrich anybody’s life.”
A keen observer of both obvious and obscure details, the human artist mentally recorded every nuance in her landmark collaborations with the apes.
“Panbanisha is very tactile with the brush. She knows what she is doing – ‘I need this other color; I need that different brush.’ She is clearly making those decisions,” Buck said. “You could see her going into that mode, forgetting [observers] were there and just enjoying it and getting lost in the motion. I knew what that felt like.”
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To view a video of the apes painting and an interview with artist Sue Buck, go here. For a slide show of Sue Buck's experience at Great Ape Trust, go here.
To learn more about Sue Buck and her art, go here. |
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In their first collaboration, Buck painted a likeness of Knobi. When it was the ape’s turn to paint, she chose a matching hue and surrounded her portrait with a purple circle. More sessions followed, and art-making held Knobi’s rapt attention for several hours over the three days Buck visited The Trust, the orangutan missing barely a brush stroke.
“What’s amazing is that I watched her very carefully, because you have to in order to paint anyone or anything,” Buck said. “She knew I was watching her, and she was being unbelievably patient about being watched that carefully.
“I think that confirmed what I know about these animals, and about myself: They have the curiosity and the intelligence and the willingness to see what happens.”
In Buck’s mind, the canvases resulting from her collaborations with Knobi and Panbanisha are as much works of art as museum pieces created by the great masters. “Non-artists might not recognize the parallel,” she allowed, “but for most artists, it’s about materials, the physical movement, the sounds – when I’m painting, you hear that scrubbing sound. It’s a very physical and sensual experience; sensual as in the senses in terms of smelling it, hearing it, feeling it.
“For artists, it’s about the mark. Every mark indicates where my hand has been, where my arm has been. We can tell how fast or how slow. So it’s a little record of someone’s presence, where they were. It’s a history, a mark of that, so in that respect, I think that anyone’s artwork is the same.”
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| Artist Sue Buck’s relationship with Great Ape Trust of Iowa began when she was commissioned to do pastel chalk drawings of bonobos and orangutans. Here, she is pictured with her pastel of the late P-Suke, father to many of The Trust’s young bonobo residents. |
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At least some of the paintings Buck created with Knobi and Panbanisha will be offered for purchase in a gallery event held in conjunction with Great Ape Trust’s second Apes Helping Apes fund-raising effort. The inaugural event held last fall raised $16,725 to support in-situ conservation efforts in Africa and Asia, where endangered wild great apes face an uncertain future. Details of the 2008 Apes Helping Apes event will be announced in the coming months.
Buck, who is currently on a one-year sabbatical from her teaching duties at Allegheny, began drawing apes about 15 years ago as an extension of what had been a seven-year artistic focus on the issues of greed and hierarchy of power among business leaders and politicians and, Buck said, “why some people are so greedy and want more than what seems to be their share.”
“Everybody kept saying, ‘Get a grip, it’s all about survival,’” Buck said. “It’s all about survival, yes, but you can survive without hurting other people.”
She began looking at a collection of photographs she had taken of gorillas and orangutans at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, N.M., where she was living at the time, and at other animals for evidence of the same competition for survival or predominance. “It takes about a split second to watch gorillas and orangutans until you realize how close they seem to be to humans,” Buck said. “Pretty quickly, I cared less about trying to figure out the human dilemma and more about those individuals and the lives they seemed to be leading.”
Her artistic journey eventually led her to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, where Dr. Rob Shumaker, now the director of orangutan research at Great Ape Trust, was coordinator of the National Zoo’s Orangutan Language Project and one of the designers and authors of the zoo’s Think Tank Exhibit. Her original art works of National Zoo orangutans Azy and Indah, who became the first ape residents of Great Ape Trust when the world-class scientific research center opened in 2004, are now part of the zoo’s permanent collection.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility in southeast Des Moines dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence. When completed, Great Ape Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.
Great Ape Trust is dedicated to providing sanctuary and an honorable life for great apes, studying the intelligence of great apes, advancing conservation of great apes and providing unique educational experiences about great apes. Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization and is certified by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). |
Great Ape Trust is certified by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums
