The ‘prancing grec’, a secondarily flightless Quadripterate (Tabulae Mortuae VII, Archives XVII)

 I know, I know; a post on this blog was long overdue. But there are mitigating circumstances. About a year ago I started painting completely different subject material in a completely different style. The style in question is the ‘ligne claire’ (‘clear line’), which is the style made popular by the Tintin ‘bandes dessinées’ (comic strips). The subject material in question is the old city centre of Leiden, where I live. Somewhat to my surprise, people liked them so much that I had two small back-to-back expositions. Preparing for an exposition turned out to take time, so I couldn’t also work on The Book or on the blog, or at least not as much as either deserves.

I hasten to add that I did work on the long-postponed blog about animal feet (working title: ‘What are feet for?’). But that isn’t ready yet, so here is a post about one of those old oil paintings that will not make it to The Book. In this case that is not because I no longer like the painting, but because the anatomy of the animals needs such a thorough make-over that it will be easier to start anew.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

What you see are two animals going through a mating ritual, involving some synchronised stepping (by the way, I never understood why that is called ‘goose-stepping’; geese don’t walk that way, I think). The animals walk bipedally but are of obvious hexapodal stock. The first two pairs of limbs have evolved into wings, which makes the animal ‘quadripterates’. Their silly small wings definitely cannot lift them, so they are secondarily flightless. While their ancestors slowly adapted to a full terrestrial mode of life, there was apparently no new purpose for the wings, so the wings slowly become smaller. You can imagine successive generations, at first impressing one another with their large wings and implied aerial prowess, while later generations kept flapping their ever smaller and ever sillier wings ever faster.

You can tell that these animals are from a very early stage in the Furaha project (meaning the 1980s). Their scientific name is Penancephalon perplexus, suggesting they are not the brightest of beasts. Their single pair of eyes is on stalks, and the animals may well have a single an unpaired vertebral column or analogue rather than a typical ‘scalate’ anatomy. The hind legs are completely mammalian, with an upper leg, lower leg and extended foot all bending in the expected directions. The toes point forwards, which is something I will get back to in the ‘What are feet for?’ post. One question to be answered there is whether toes must always point forward in running terrestrial animals or whether you can also have backwards-pointing toes. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, the animals are going through their choreographed little mating dance. They look back at the viewer as if to say ’Who are you calling ridiculous?’.