Blue Giant

I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in the south of India, where elephants were part of ordinary life. For a while I lived in a place the wild ones visited regularly, and there were trained elephants in the temples and up in the mountains, doing the work no human could.

People imagine them only as enormous, and they are that. But they are gentle, and they are social, and in some ways they feel more human than we give them credit for. They seem to love the people around them.

I painted this one to hold on to a single memory. I was a small child, looking up at an elephant that seemed as tall as a building, when my grandmother asked the mahout to lift me onto its back. I was scared to death. Then the elephant itself helped me up, careful and unhurried, and every bit of that fear melted away. That is the moment I wanted to keep.