Bufos: Invaders Down Under — Michael Henry's Art: Contextural Journeys

The Idea for the Painting

There were two personal experiences that led me to create my newest painting.

The first experience was during my last undergraduate semester at Purdue when I worked in a biology lab helping do research on the biochemistry of retinas. The research was conducted on the retinas of Bufo Marinus toads. If you have never seen a bufo, they are large ugly toads with attitude, that are at least as big as an adult human hand. Here is a picture of one.

The second experience was in late 2019 just before Covid appeared, when we took a cruise that circumnavigated the Australian continent. There were a number of lectures about Australia during this cruise and one of them discussed the worst invading species that have been brought into Australia. At the top of this list was one they call the cane toad since it was brought in to control pests that attacked the cane fields. It turns out that the correct name for the cane toad is Bufo Marinus. The bufos did their jobs of controlling the pests, but unfortunately, they also ate virtually anything that fit into their rather large mouths. Even worse, they have large poisonous sacs on their backs that can kill predators that eat them. As a result, over the last several decades the number of bufos has been exploding all over Australia and killing many native animals. No one has been able to figure out a good way to stop them.

Also during this cruise, we went to museums and galleries exhibiting Aboriginal art, and I was drawn to it. The one Aboriginal painter whose work appealed most to me was an artist called Billawarra. His paintings use brightly-colored, stylized depictions of native Australian fauna interwoven with Aboriginal symbols. It’s hard to do justice to the beauty of his works with words, so here is a website that shows a number of his paintings. Be sure to click on each painting to enlarge it so that you can see the detail. (www.doongal.com.au/content/billawarra )

My last painting ‘Snow Leopard’ was also inspired by this Australian cruise, but other than our seeing it in the Melbourne zoo, the snow leopard had nothing to do with Australia. When I saw the Aboriginal paintings, the idea came to me to use my Contextural style to create a painting that pays homage to Aboriginal art since both styles tend to use patterns, dots, symbols and bright colors. Although the bufo toad is one of the more recent Australian invaders, given my personal history with the species, their use in my painting to represent all of the past and present invaders seemed appropriate.

Creating the Painting

Aboriginal art uses symbolism to tell stories. One of the most frequently used Aboriginal symbols depicts running water between waterholes. In the arid interior of Australia, nothing is more important than supplies of fresh water. This symbol is shown below.

My painting uses the bufo toad to represent the many invaders who have spread unchecked across the Australian continent over the past few hundred years to the detriment of the Aboriginals and all of the native flora and fauna.

To depict the entire Australian continent, I filled the canvas with an interconnected series of these symbols for waterholes connected by running water.

I first did a pencil drawing laying out these interconnected symbols as shown below. The larger central area represents the interior of the continent. The smaller areas around this central core represent the exterior coastal areas.

Next came the background color. Given that Aboriginal art uses bright colors, I decided on yellow that goes with virtually any color painted on top of it.

The base color for the concentric circles symbolizing all of the waterholes across the continent was then added using dark blue.

Using one of my Contextural techniques, I added three layers of dots each a lighter shade of blue on top of each other to add color, texture and dimensionality to the concentric circles.

Here’s a close-up of three of these waterholes.

Here are all of the waterholes.

I painted the wavy lines of water between the waterhole circles using a lighter shade of blue.

Next I added lighter blue dots on top of these water waves.

Here are all of the water waves.

Now that all of the symbols of the waterholes connected by running water were complete, it was time to start painting the bufo toads themselves.

To tell the story of the bufos spreading across the entire continent, there needed to be bufos in all of the separate areas of the painting. Two different views of the toads are used - one view from above and a second frontal view of just their faces.

I first drew pencil outlines of each of the bufos.

Again in the tradition of Aboriginal paintings’ usage of bright colors, I decided to paint the bufos using green instead of their actual drab brownish and grayish colors.

First. I painted the base color.

I then added some more structural detail.

I differentiated the colors of the base layers of the toad bodies. The large poison sacs found on both sides behind the toad’s head and the lips on its face are the lightest colors, while the multitude of granular glands (often mistaken for warts) are the darker circles.

Here’s a close-up of the largest toad at this stage.

If you look closely at the bufos’ eyes, they have metallic bronze sparkles in them.

So I painted metallic bronze dots in each of the bufos’ eyes. Here are close-ups of the two views with the metallic sparkles added.

As I did with the waterhole and waves symbols, I painted layers of dots each a lighter shade of green onto each granular gland to add color, texture and dimensionality.

Here’s a close-up of the completed largest toad.

Some friends who saw the painting at this point congratulated me on finishing it. What they didn’t know was that one thing that Aboriginal art and my Contextural style share is an abhorrence of empty spaces in a painting. Both use patterns, dots or symbols almost everywhere on the canvas.

I needed to decide how to fill the spaces around each toad using my Contextural style to create native symbols of Australia. I decided that for the coastal areas around the outside of the continent an appropriate background would be one of Australia’s most iconic natural formations, the coral reefs.

The coral reefs include a multitude of colors many of them being different shades of green. However since the bufos are already many shades of green, I decided to use pink as the coral’s color. Although pink is not the most frequently found color in the reefs, it does go quite well with all of the yellows, blues and greens in the rest of the painting.

Below is a close-up of one of these outer areas with a pink coral reef background.

Here are all of the outer areas with their coral reef backgrounds.

I also decided to add some additional layers of dots between the waves using lightening shades of aqua green.

Here’s a close-up.

Here are all of the waves with these additional layers of dots.

The last part of the painting that needed to be completed was the addition of symbols around the largest bufo toad in the central core area, representing Australia’s arid inland.

I first chose the Aboriginal symbol for the goanna which is the generic name for a number of lizards living in the desert. The symbol includes the foot and tail tracks left by the lizard as it walks across the sand.

Below is a drawing of this symbol.

I used the same bronze metallic paint for these symbols that I used for the sparkles in the bufos’ eyes.

Here are the goanna symbols in my painting.

For the last symbol, I chose the most famous Australian gem stone - the opal.

To create my opals I started with the pink circular base layers shown below.

On top of these pink circles, I painted lighter circles using more and more yellow. The resulting opals go well with both the pink coral backgrounds in the outer areas and the yellow background in the central core.

Here are the finished circular opals.

I liked the opals so much I decided to add them above the waterhole and waves symbols around the entire painting.

Below is a small sample of these opals that surround the entire painting.

Finally, below is my latest finished painting - ‘Bufos: Invaders Down Under’.

This painting pays homage to the characteristics I admire in Aboriginal paintings, but was created using my own Contextural style and my personal history with the Bufo Marinus toads. I hope you enjoy the painting, and if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them.