the leopard and the snakey-beast

This motif was one of the most agreeable to stitch, and watching it emerge was very satisfying. I changed the snakey-beast’s colorway with two shades of olive green and gave it a red eye. The leopard’s eye is the same bright olive because the two are regarding one another, entwined, and I kept thinking about Paul Schrader’s 1980s film Cat People, and hearing Giorgio Moroder’s soundtrack and David Bowie’s voice singing “…I’ve been putting out the fire, with gasoline…” So now you have an eensy insight into why this is my favorite motif thus far.

The leopard’s spots were worked by my third-grade self, when “How the Leopard Got His Spots” from Rudyard Kiplings’s Just So Stories was one of my best beloved books.

Before this, I thought the striped lion was my favorite animal, with its Nepalese flag-reminiscent rising sun and its music Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Gold Lion. Curiously, I learned that until 1962, both emblems of that flag had faces; they were removed for “modernization”. Natalia’s chart has faces on its suns which I chose to omit. Me and Nepal, thinking modern. And the Gold Lion lyric, “Gold lion’s gonna tell me where the light is / Take our hands out of control” is an interesting concept to consider when making tiny stitches.