Jonathan Morrill

Painting

Painting

"Florida Skunk Ape" is one of two pieces submitted and accepted into
The National Arts Program's 2017 art exhibition held at the Orlando International Airport.
The exhibition will be held open to the public, at the Orlando International Airport, from August 24 through September 29, 2017, during the hours of 9am - 5pm..
This acrylic painting pays tribute to the photographs and reports of the Florida skunk Ape, utilizing witness descriptions and forensic evidence found at the reported sightings.
The skunk ape, also known as the swamp cabbage man, swamp ape, stink ape, Florida
Bigfoot, Louisiana Bigfoot, myakka ape, swampsquatch, and myakka skunk ape, is a hominid cryptid said to inhabit the U.S. states of Florida, North Carolina, and Arkansas, although reports from Florida are most common. It is named for its appearance and for the unpleasant odor that is said to accompany it.
Reports of the skunk ape were particularly common in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1974, sightings of a large, foul-smelling, hairy, ape-like creature, which ran upright on
two legs were reported in suburban neighborhoods of Dade County, Florida.
Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has written that some of the reports may represent sightings of the black bear (Ursus americanus) and it is likely that other sightings are hoaxes or mis-identification of wildlife.
The United States National Park Service considers the skunk ape to be a hoax.
In 2000, two photographs said to be of the skunk ape were taken by an anonymous woman and mailed to the Sheriff's Department of Sarasota County, Florida.
The photographs were accompanied by a letter from the woman in which she claimed to have photographed an ape in her backyard. T
he woman wrote that on three different nights, an ape had entered her backyard to take apples left on her back porch.
She was convinced the ape was an escaped orangutan.
The pictures have become known to Bigfoot enthusiasts as the "skunk ape photos".
Loren Coleman is the primary researcher on the photographs, having helped track down the two photographs to an "Eckerd photo lab at the intersection of Fruitville and Tuttle Roads" in Sarasota, Florida.
According to Chester Moore Jr., the photographs were taken in Sarasota County
near the Myakka River.

Painting

Within You Without You
(16" x 20" Acrylic on Canvas)
Within You Without You was composed on a harmonium following a dinner party at the London home of Klaus Voorman, the German artist and musician whom The Beatles first met in Hamburg. Written by George Harrison, it was the only non Lennon-McCartney song on the Sgt Pepper album.
The song was George Harrison's second full-blown Indian recording, after Revolver's Love You To. Although regarded by some as a dull interlude in the otherwise masterful Sgt Pepper, Within You Without You encapsulated the exploration of spiritual themes that had become popular in 1967's Summer of Love.
Clear references to the counterculture ('Are you one of them?') and the LSD-related ego death ('And to see you're really only very small and life flows on within you and without you') can be found amid the more other-worldly exploration of spiritual philosophy and religious teachings.
The laughter at the end of the track was Harrison's idea. While some listeners initially thought it was the sound of the other Beatles mocking his songwriting effort, it was in fact meant to lighten the mood after five minutes of sad, almost mournful, music.
Within You Without You came about after I had spent a bit of time in India and fallen under the spell of the country and its music. I had brought back a lot of instruments. It was written at Klaus Voormann's house in Hampstead after dinner one night. The song came to me when I was playing a pedal harmonium.
I'd also spent a lot of time with Ravi Shankar, trying to figure out how to sit and hold the sitar, and how to play it. Within You Without You was a song that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi's that he'd recorded for All-India Radio. It was a very long piece - maybe 30 or 40 minutes - and was written in different parts, with a progression in each. I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I'd discovered in his piece. I recorded in three segments and spliced them together later.
George Harrison
This composition of this piece came to me, appropriately enough, through meditation. I was thinking about George Harrison, not living in the material world with us any longer, but how his message goes on without him, and how, in "All Things Must Pass" the lyric;
"Sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this my love is up
And must be leaving
But it's not always going
To be this grey"
I thought it would be appropriate to have him playing a sitar on the shore at sunset, yet the sitar, being a material object, casts a shadow, while George himself is drifting in and out of existence in the material world, and casts no shadow.

Painting

"The Dodo's Last Gleaming"
This painting depicts one of the last Dodo birds
watching his fate unfold before him.
The Dodo, (Raphus cucullatus), is an extinct flightless bird of Mauritius, an island of the Indian Ocean; It is one of the three species that constituted the family Raphidae, usually placed with pigeons in the order Columbiformes but sometimes separated as an order (Raphiformes).
The other two species, also found on islands of the Indian Ocean, were the solitaires (Raphus solitarius of Réunion and Pezophaps solitaria of Rodrigues).
The birds were first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507 and were exterminated by humans and their introduced animals. The dodo was extinct by 1681, the Réunion solitaire by 1746, and the Rodrigues solitaire by about 1790.
The dodo is frequently cited as one of the most well-known examples of human-induced extinction and also serves as a symbol of obsolescence with respect to human technological progress.
It’s commonly believed that the dodo went extinct because Dutch sailors ate the beast to extinction after finding that the bird was incredibly easy to catch due to the fact it had no fear of humans, (why it didn’t fear the creature many times its size is a mystery for another day).This is, for the for the most part, pretty accurate.
It is noted that after sailors landed and settled on the island in 1598, the dodo’s population rapidly declined and other sources confirm that the dodo was indeed hunted by sailors looking for an easy snack, since the dodo’s ungainly gait and lack of a third axis of movement made it relatively easy to catch.
However, in a report released by the Oxford University of Natural History, it’s the animals the sailors brought with them that are named as one of the key reasons our hapless feathery friend saw his demise. Pigs, dogs and rats are all animals said to have developed a taste for dodo eggs; this introduction of such animals into a foreign ecosystem, combined with humans hunting and eating them, saw the delicate balance the dodo had enjoyed for so long destroyed. The species was soon cripplingly endangered. And as a result, it faded from existence.
The dodo was bigger than a turkey, and weighed about 50 pounds.
It had blue-gray plumage, a big head, a 9-inch blackish bill with a reddish sheath forming the hooked tip, small useless wings, stout yellow legs, and a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end.
The Réunion solitaire may have been a white version of the dodo.
The brownish Rodrigues solitaire was taller and more slender, with smaller head, short bill lacking the heavy hook, and wings with knobs.
All that remains of the dodo is a head and foot at Oxford, a foot in the British Museum,
a head in Copenhagen, and skeletons, more or less complete, in various museums of Europe, the United States, and Mauritius.
Many bones of solitaires have also been preserved.
The dodo’s prominent role in bringing attention to the extinction of species,
coupled with advances in genetics that could allow for its resurrection (de-extinction),
have led scientists to consider the possibility of bringing the dodo back.
The sequencing of the dodo genome by geneticists in 2016 reinvigorated this discussion as well as the ethical debate of using de-extinction techniques to alter natural history.

Painting

Snow Monkeys, a Red Panda, an Alligator Snapping Turtle, a Japanese Tree Frog,
a flying squirrel, a giant salamander, Japanese Fiddler Crabs, and Japanese Giant Wasps, make up the ensemble menagerie of the Japanese animals
in this magnificent acrylic painting.