Chapter 5

The Mysterious Case of the Masked Artist

There are those who would tell you that when Brittany the elephant slaps her trunk across a canvas at the Milwaukee County Zoo, what she creates is not art. For them, the fact that the Zoo gift shop sold thirty-six of her creations at $30 each and that people have them hanging in their homes and offices does not change a thing. It is still not art, nor is similar work done around the world by kangaroos, chimpanzees, pandas, sea lions, Komodo dragons, and orangutans. Real artists have names like Cezanne, Wyeth, Renoir, Warhol, and Picasso and are covered in glory. They are not covered in fur and called Archie, Bella, and Congo. Human art is creative and valuable; animal art is a joke worth only an amused chuckle now and then. Don’t compare the two, seriously. Please, please do not compare them. Otherwise, you might find out that in 2005 at a London art auction, a painting by Congo the Chimp sold for $26,352, while ones by Warhol and Renoir went unsold.

Kramer

One day, perhaps soon, someone will write a major academic comparison of the two master painters Claude Monet and Kramer. Each broke new ground with their creative styles, shocked the public, gained media attention, and attracted imitators who turned their personal innovations into successful new artistic movements. On that day, it will be noted that each did so despite significant visual impairment.

Food Washer?

The raccoon’s scientific name, Procyon lotor, perpetuates the myth that this animal washes its food. The Latin word lotor means “washer.” If near water, a raccoon will seem to wash its food, but scientists now believe it is reenacting an ancient species’s feeding pattern, called a vacuum behaviour. Raccoons are thought to have lived originally near brooks and ponds, finding most of their food in them. Although they have adapted to live in almost any habitat, their instinct is to act as if all food comes from water, which makes them appear to be washing it.

The major difference between Monet and Kramer was that the former gradually lost his sight, while the latter eventually gained hers. Of course, one was male and the other female, which could be worth at least some scholarly ventilation. There was also the fact that while Monet was a Frenchman, Kramer was a raccoon.

Of course, Kramer was also an orphan. That is how most raccoons arrive at Hope for Wildlife. Every spring, newborns flood the society’s Seaforth rehabilitation centre in numbers so great that they regularly take up at least half of the spaces available for summer care. The rehab centre has sometimes had more than three hundred motherless kits to assess, feed, and clean up after, and it seems to get worse every year. The reason is the highly adaptable nature of a raccoon. They are no longer animals found only in the countryside. Cities and towns have increasingly become their habitat, and they are quite happy to forage through garbage bins rather than woods and meadows. Raccoons are destructive with a natural inclination for mess creation. They cannot help it. As foragers, they sort through things, and create human enemies along the way.

Raccoon orphans like Kramer and her kin are the annual result. When she comes out of a winter den, a female raccoon is lean, hungry, and ready to breed. Once she has, she finds a warm, dry place to have her litter. When raccoons were solely country animals, this place was usually a log or hollow tree. Now that they are citified, it is more likely to be an attic or under a garage. Then she goes into provider mode, and nearby available garbage is easier food than hunting can bring, and a lot quicker. Property owners see the foraging mom, get a glimpse of her entering and exiting a den, and want her gone. The female raccoon is simply trying to feed her young, but her persistence usually gets her shot or trapped. People are advised every year to check for young ones before spring elimination of a mature raccoon, but they seldom do. The adult is what they see, so that is what they get rid of. Only later do they find the starving kits. If they can still be saved and someone cares enough, in Nova Scotia they end up at Hope for Wildlife.

When the 2007 orphan raccoon deluge started, no one realized at first that the little squawker with the wiry mop of unruly hair was blind. She had quickly been named Kramer after the television character with similarly bad hair, but with so many kits tumbling, fighting, getting into things, and another lot showing up each day, it took a while to notice that Kramer would bump into things when startled, or walk straight to the end of a table and fall off. Workers began to suspect visual impairment. It appeared that Kramer knew if something near her moved, but was not sure when, how, or what.

“If you waved your hand in front of her, there would be a delayed response,” said staff member Laura Bond. “If you played with toys, she would react after the toy went by, as if she was reacting to the shadow. When the vet came out to take a look at her, he could see her eyes were quite cloudy. It wasn’t like cataracts, it was just that her eyes weren’t clear.”

Another worker who provided care for Kramer was Sara Seemel. Since the little animal had no way of knowing she was handicapped, Seemel could see no sign that it affected her personality.

“It didn’t really seem to faze her at all. She was a little bit quirky, walking off things, and she did get spooked sometimes, but she got along just fine with the other raccoons. They wrestled and tussled and chewed on each other and slept in a big pile. She’d fit right in. It took us a while to figure out she was definitely impaired,” she explained.

It wasn’t the first time a blind raccoon had arrived at Hope for Wildlife. Raccoons are born blind, with eyes closed for several weeks, and when they open, there can be problems. Sometimes after a few months, their sight improves. Often the animal remains blind, and since after a month or so Kramer did not appear to have improved vision, the assumption was made that she was one of the unlucky ones. Kramer was removed from the “hands off” list of animals destined to be released and the staff started conditioning her to get along with humans so she might be used someday in education.

“That decision had to be made because we didn’t want to release her into the wild and have something happen to her,” said Bond.

The raccoon’s blindness had already singled her out for special attention, but now that all contact restraints were off, Kramer became the pet of the barn and everyone’s favourite. Before long, staffers were looking at what had been done for years with Sweet Pea, their three-legged house fox. Every year, orphaned fox kits were handed over to her for a good dose of vixen discipline and introduction to foxy ways.

“We thought Kramer could be like a surrogate mum to our kits when they came in. We could put them with her and she could teach them how to be raccoons,” said Bond.

Kramer became spoiled. Because she appeared headed for a life full of people, she received star treatment and total coddling.

“We knew that if we were going to keep her as an educational animal, we had to try to keep her tame,” said Bond. “We needed to condition her so she wouldn’t be vicious to people going into the unit, so we had a special little blue harness for her and we’d take her out wherever we went. There’s a corner store just two minutes down the road from Hope’s and Sara and I, if we had a little break around suppertime, would put Kramer on a leash and just walk into the store with her on our shoulders. She was spoiled rotten.”

It was Nicole Payne who introduced Kramer to paints. Neither she nor anyone else at Hope for Wildlife had the slightest notion of what they were about to start.

“I didn’t take it seriously at all,” Payne recalled. “A volunteer came out of the raccoon enclosure, Dan’s Den, with muddy paw prints all up and down her khaki pant legs. She made a joke about the raccoons fingerpainting her pants again, and the idea blossomed from there.”

Raccoons have paws that are twenty times more sensitive than human hands. They love to touch and handle things, appearing to seek out and relish new tactile sensations. As a blind raccoon, Kramer’s sense of touch seemed to increase in proportion to her dependence on it, which gave Payne an idea. If human children loved to spend hours feeling and smearing fingerpaints, would not a raccoon, with a tactile sense so much greater, revel in that activity even more? She started her experiment with Kramer, and it was an absolute hit. Soon other workers were involved and every raccoon was given at least one session of fingerpaint therapy.

Kramer, the blind raccoon who started an art movement.

“We thought it was a great idea. It was the perfect way of interacting with animals and having fun with them,” said Bond. “When we tried with some of the raccoons, they were clearly not interested, so we’d just go with ones like Kramer who really seemed to enjoy it.”

Using non-toxic, washable fingerpaints, the artistic moments happened in a large stainless steel tub. Globs of different coloured paint were placed in the bottom, then a raccoon gently deposited next to them. Usually, the raccoon would immediately start handling the paint. If they didn’t, a worker would dab one paw to let them feel it. Once they started playing, a mounted blank canvas would be set beside them. Paw prints and other marks soon covered it as the raccoon explored. Often, what resulted was a complete mess, artistic gibberish, as the masked artists used not only paws but also tails and backsides to smear everything together. However, certain raccoons seemed to have a knack for creating something with form and order. Kramer was by the far the most talented, with apprentices Berrie and Tiny Tim quickly following. Sometimes, a worker would prop up a canvas and guide a paint-covered paw over it to get things started. Then the raccoon would “do the rest on their own creative design,” as Bond put it.

Artist at work! This was the first of many paintings Kramer has done at Hope for Wildlife.

“They seemed to enjoy feeling it in the pads of their paws. The paint was only a sensation to them, so they were definitely feeling that over and over,” she said.

The exploring of new textures seemed to please Kramer more than the other raccoons, and the paintings that volunteers liked were put aside. Before long, there were several dozen paintings, and even Payne, who had started it all more or less as a joke, had to admit they were attractive.

“The very first painting still hangs in the nursery at the rehab. It actually looked like something. Her first masterpiece was a yellow, red, blue, and green abstract piece called The Rooster,” Payne said.

No one is certain whose idea it was to offer the paintings by Kramer and peers for sale to the public. Everyone admits the first “Raccoon art sale” was done with tongue firmly planted in cheek at the Hope for Wildlife Open House in late August. Some workers thought the joke was being taken a bit too far.

“Then we saw the reaction of the people at the open house. They sold all of them, every one we had, at that first open house. They were just flying off the table. I mean, I really wanted to get one, but I didn’t get a chance to sneak in until later and they’d all been sold,” Bond said.

From there, word of this new art form started to spread. Someone would see a genuine Kramer in a home or office and decide they had to have one. Custom orders with specifications for colours started to come in. Payne took over production and orders as a regular part of her work, and the paintings went on sale permanently in the rehab centre gift shop. Suddenly, Kramer was to raccoon art as Monet had been to French Impressionism.

In theory, once a school of art has been established, you don’t need the master anymore, and that was true with Kramer. Raccoon art was well established in September when her eyesight unexpectedly cleared up. Like many coddled or spoiled animals, she was used to getting her own way, and what Kramer now wanted was freedom. She got to be cranky and hard to handle—a regular maturing raccoon—so when her peers were sent to the wild in late September, she went with them. Bond and the other summer workers were gone by then, but were happy for Kramer when they heard.

“Truthfully, it’s best for them to be out in the wild. They are wild animals. I knew she would have been very comfortable if she’d stayed at the rehab because everyone would have spoiled her, but it was so much more exciting to hear she had got her sight back and gone back to the wild,” said Bond.

Kramer’s departure did not stop the flow of raccoon art. She became a legendary centrepiece, the blind, orphan artist who started it, and every year since, a few new raccoons showed talent and continued her work. The demand did not ebb either. Hope Swinimer kept a few paintings next to her office desk at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, just in case. Payne set up a display in a convenience store where she had winter work and sold everything she had, making over $700 for the centre.

The successful sales and their contribution to the always tight Hope for Wildlife finances were appreciated by Swinimer, but did not prepare her for the shocker that came in 2009. She and the rest of her staff were taken aback early that year when Adrianna Afford of Argyle Fine Art in Halifax’s Historic Properties contacted them. Would Hope for Wildlife like to stage a raccoon art exhibition over the upcoming March break?

The idea had come from a client of the gallery who knew Swinimer and her work. She was aware of what was going on with the raccoon art and explained it to Afford.

There are good reasons why it is illegal to keep a raccoon as a pet. This is the cute kit stage. In less than six months, raccoons become dangerous and very difficult to handle.

“She sort of pitched the idea to me. It was so strange and interesting, so I just thought, what the heck, we’ll just try it,” said Afford.

Afford chose March break to open the show in the hopes that more families would come, and visitors poured in as the week progressed, helped substantially by newspaper, television, and radio coverage of the story of Hope for Wildlife, Kramer, and raccoon art. Everything built towards the Saturday, when Swinimer announced she would be there with her saw-whet owl, Seesaw. Argyle Fine Art had never seen a crowd that size for an event.

“It was packed. The whole day was packed,” Afford reported. “It was the middle of March, not the nicest time of the year, and a cold day, but we had families and children and piles of people showing up everywhere.”

According to Afford, it was more than just a chance to buy raccoon art; it brought in people curious to find out what Hope for Wildlife was all about.

“Hearing the story behind how this all began, that was really intriguing for people. It kind of started some really interesting conversations that probably wouldn’t come up normally in our gallery,” Afford said.

Swinimer was unprepared for the diversity of the people who came out for the show. Paintings were sold, others custom ordered, but like Afford, the Hope for Wildlife founder believed it was the conversation that stood out.

A Thief, and a Smart One

Because their nimble forepaws resemble hands and black facial markings look like a mask, raccoons have been mythologized as very capable thieves. That reputation, it turns out, may be more truth than legend. Recent studies have shown that a raccoon can remember for up to three years a series of tasks needed to get into a food source.

“I think people came to the show not only to see what we had to offer, but to tell us their raccoon stories,” she said. “That was a lot of fun because everybody has a raccoon story or two to share.”

For Nicole Payne, whose idea started raccoon art as a means of entertaining a young, blind raccoon named Kramer, there is no end in sight for this story. Every year she offers fingerpaint to all the new kits, looking for the ones who will be that year’s artists. When they are found, they can no longer simply splash around with random colours. Custom orders with very specific demands have taken over. In 2009, a woman in Nova Scotia sent each of her grandchildren in British Columbia paintings in their favourite colours.

“People are asking for custom orders to match specific rooms in their homes,” Payne explained. “I’m in the process of getting together two paintings for a woman in Ontario who wants one as large as possible that matches the colours in her den and another that matches her nursery colours to hang in her unborn daughter’s room.”

Custom-ordered art? Perhaps it is just a matter of time before a scholar or journalist treks though the woods of Nova Scotia, hoping to find Kramer to get her opinion on what the new generation has done to her art form.

On the other hand, perhaps Hope Swinimer comes closer to the truth:

“I think it’s been a brilliant idea,” she said. “People find it fun. To me, it’s been a way to bring humour into what we do every day, a way to lighten the negatives of our world.”