A cave in Indonesia. On the rock, in faded red, a wild pig stands solid and alive, with small human figures gathered around it. Nobody knows who painted it, or by what light. It is among the oldest painted stories anyone has found, made tens of thousands of years ago. Before farming, before cities, before a single written word, one of the first scenes our ancestors chose to record was people and an animal, together.
Mexico. Frida Kahlo painted herself again and again with her animals beside her: spider monkeys, parrots, her dogs, a young deer. It is as though she could not describe herself without them. Perhaps she couldn't.
California. David Hockney painted his two dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, dozens of times, often curled asleep in patches of light, and gathered the pictures into a book. What else would you paint, if you loved them?
A child's bedroom, anywhere in the world. A picture book read so often its spine has cracked. Rabbits in waistcoats, bears with suitcases, a caterpillar with an appetite. Many of us first learned what kindness, greed and courage look like through animals who talked.
A phone, last night. Ninety photographs of a cat doing nothing at all, and not one you can bring yourself to delete.
Place these scenes side by side and a pattern emerges. We make art about animals because they are beautiful, certainly, but also because they hold feelings we struggle to name directly. A painting of a dog waiting by a door says more about loyalty than an essay could. A story about a frightened rabbit can give a child another way to talk about fear.
Animals give us a little distance from ourselves, and distance is where art lives. Through them we can look at love, loss, wildness and tenderness without staring straight into the sun.
There is also the simplest motive of all: we make in order to keep what we cannot keep. A sketch of a childhood pony. A poem for a cat. The photograph that caught exactly how a dog tilted its head. Making is a form of holding on.
What has an animal moved you to make? A drawing stuck to the fridge, a song, a hundred photographs of the same sleeping dog? We'd love to see it.
Sources: Nature, narrative cave art in Indonesia · AnOther, Frida Kahlo's monkeys, dogs and birds · Country Life, David Hockney's dachshunds