Year of the Boar

The linocut print shows the Boar and its Chinese character. It is in black water-based ink on Japanese kozo paper (8.5 inches by 12.5 inches or 21.7 cm by 32 cm) made to celebrate the Year of the Boar.

This is the second linocut I've made on this theme. Since the 12th creature in the Chinese Zodiac can be interpreted as either pig or boar, I've made a linocut to celebrate both. I was inspired by a customer buying a collection of Chinese Zodiac prints for the respective years of birth of her family. Her son wanted something more fearsome than my pig. Finding reference material for wild boars was a real challenge! I enlisted RJH. Most photos I found of boars were either cute, or dead (next to proud hunters). Boar piglets are possibly even cuter than domesticated piglets. I wanted fearsome, and live. I tried googling 'fearsome boar' and mainly found videos of tigers hunting boar. Also, there are a number of subspecies, and I wanted to find something which could be found in Asia, rather than say, a razorback in the southern US. RJH suggested that they are in fact quite fearsome, and people simply did not stop to take photos. I protested that there are fearsome photos of tigers and great white sharks and he rebutted with talk of open spaces, telephoto lenses and a sort of elusiveness to difficulty to demand argument. He compared it to wolverines. We all know there are wolverines out there, but frankly, you don't want to meet one, and they don't want to meet us... thus there are not that many photos of them out there.

I hope this boar is sufficiently fearsome to appeal to a young man... I think the snarl and tusks help.