ACRYLIC ON FOUND CALENDAR • 12.5” x 30”
$88 • Email julie@juliemeridian.com to buy this artwork ⇢
This calendar re-paint reflects a Chinese folktale about a little monkey who came down from the mountain. It took a little while to find a folktale about monkeys that was not about the Monkey King, a story too big to illustrate here and usually depicting the Monkey King with a more human-like body (plus clothing).
The monkey, coming down from the mountain, is excited to find peaches and gathers them. Further down, he finds corn and abandons the peaches for that. Continuing on, the corn is left behind in favor of a watermelon. Then a rabbit rushes by, and he drops the watermelon to pursue it. After a chase, the rabbit is lost and the monkey ends up with nothing.
The illustration on this calendar is the most abstract one of the calendars I found in how it uses blotches of colors for the monkeys, rocks, and leaves. The monkeys were originally so blotchy that I filled in all of their white areas with yellow ochre so they’d stand out from the rock and sky. Still: did you notice there are three? I didn’t at first.
On a few of these repaints I’ve ended up painting out additional foliage from the edges because it was too distracting. I left the sky pretty simple since the rock and plants have a lot of texture.
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