B is for Bunyip

        My theme for this year’s April A-Z Blog Challenge is fantastical creatures, celebrating my upcoming book, On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination, which will be released by the end of the year.  Please take a look at my Kickstarter Campaign for this project.

        The two creatures representing B in my bestiary are the bunyip and the baku, both of which you can learn more about by clicking the link to read 

the entire post about Mythical Creatures of the Letter B.

(And clicking through again from there for a little more on the baku!)

        Today, rather than include an excerpt from the book, I want to direct you to another previous post, on the issue of Inclusivity vs Appropriation.  Both of today’s creatures belong to cultures that are not from my own background, and it’s worth giving a little thought to what that means for artists and writers.  Please feel free to add your own thoughts about this in the comments below today’s post, or the post I’ve linked.

        As for today’s block print, I was inspired by the idea of how Aboriginal art is often about diagramming stories and mythologies.  To be clear, those stories being illustrated are not necessarily intended to be shared with people like me, who are outsiders to that culture.  Indeed, it may be that a lot of the visual vocabulary that has become characteristic of Australian Aboriginal art was devised precisely to obscure the deeper meanings from outsiders.  That said, I liked the idea of placing the bunyip in its mythological context and I wanted to show it as being connected with the land and water.  So I placed my bunyip on a shape of the continent of Australia (very abstracted, admittedly), and marked the continent’s larger lakes with circles.  I was not trying to make my illustration “look Australian,” but

rather trying to let my own creativity be sparked by some of the same ideas that inspire Aboriginal Australian artists.  Modern European-Australian adaptations of the bunyip legend are reflected in my making the beast look rather less monstrous and more appealingly quirky, although descriptions of the bunyip are so numerous and widely varied that I was going to have to imagine my own version in any case.

[Picture: Bunyip’s Land, rubber block print by AEGN, 2019.]