Deer Me

We had a deer on one of our bird feeders today.

Before I explain that away, I’m going to pause and let you savor the image. That’s it — take it all in. People ask where writers get their ideas. Sometimes all you have to do is sit still and let the world rotate and Nature take its course. Writing is the coupling of observation with imagination.

Of course, the deer wasn’t “on” the feeder. She was standing next to it, pushing and shoving with her mouth while using her delicate tongue to dislodge and get at some of the seed. She probably would have eaten all of it if  hadn’t cracked the nearby door so that, in a skip and a hop and six-foot jump, she was gone. Though she had departed, she'd left behind an image. In my mind, if not in reality.

Flying horses are everywhere. In kids’ toys, in advertisements, on clothing and bed linens and the sides and hoods of 1970s vehicles. Such fantasy creatures are nearly always white. Never understood that. As a writer, you seek variety in your scribing. I always assumed artists would think likewise. So there’s an immediate challenge for all would-be writers. Get rid of the white flying horses. What else you got?

Color change. White to black. Even better, white to spotted (appaloosa). And spots on the wings, too. I’ve never seen a painting, not even (yet) one done by AI, that showed an appaloosa winged horse. Why? Lack of artistic imagination? Maybe because AI draws from existing sources, and art features all-white winged horses.

So why not a winged deer? I suspect there are some iterations out there, but they’re lost in a sea (flock?) of white wings. I’ve seen plenty of art featuring winged cats and winged dogs, but they’re always just cats and dogs with solid-color wings attached. No real thought has gone into the final vision. An artist will paint, say, a winged tiger, but there are no stripes on the wings. Or a winged leopard (much rarer image) but no spots on the wings.

I mentioned AI. It’s already changing things and the trend is only going to accelerate. Prompt Midjourney or ChatGPT or, even better, Veo3 and its ilk to generate a flying  leopard and see if you get spots on the appendages. Are these AIs advanced enough to carry the motif through to the wings, or will they do no better than the humans artists on whose work they draw (pun intended here)? Cats dominate YouTube, but where are the truly inventively drawn cats that we have a right to expect to spring from the minds of artists?

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Hey, AI: show me a cat with prehensile thumbs. I own shirts that show cats as samurai holding swords. Can AI do better? Better than the cats in Puss in Boots: the Last Wish? Wondrous film, by the way. Who would have thought that the scariest film villain of the last five years would be a cartoon wolf?

I once had an artist acquaintance paint a picture of a saber-toothed cat to illustrate a story I later wrote, but as a predator in arctic climes. The fur is white and spotted with black. If evolution can bring forth a snow leopard, why not a snow sabertooth? Thankfully, science is finally showing paleoartists the way to paint prehistoric animals with vibrant colors; not just as they used to be portrayed, only in shades of brown and gray.

In Kanha National Park in India I saw a male tiger lying under a tree. It absolutely blended in with its surroundings. If not for a guide, I never would have seen it. A yellow animal with black stripes and patches of white. Why would a Cretaceous utahraptor hunting in a forest not feature green and black stripes on a dark body? There is a reason alligators are not bright yellow.

Times change, and art changes with it, more often than people realize, thanks to scientific advances. But for artists, imagination must always be at the forefront of composition. It’s not a matter of inspiration. Inspiration is all around us, like the bird-seed eating deer in our front yard. Or the supposedly extinct Hawaiian akialoa that, in a story, to survive evolves to drink blood instead of nectar. If Nature can switch things up, so should artists.

I want to see a flying deer, whose antlers generate flashes of electricity between them, like Tesla coils. And maybe with red eyes. And fangs (well, there’s the Chinese water deer, so we already have that). How about bat wings instead of feathery wings?

Weird, I know. But that’s part of my job. Almost as weird as a white-tailed deer nibbling from a bird feeder. Most of the birds just ignored it. Not the scrub jay. He punched a hundred times his size. And therein lies — another story.