My wife has a rather large collection of elephant statues. In looking for a subject for a still-life, I decided to use this heavy bronze elephant as a subject. I thought it would be visually interesting to add some different metal elements, so I polished up some copper pipe fittings that I had lying around and made a still-life out of it. A visiting friend commented that the copper plumbing parts looked like shotgun shells, and thought I had created a political statement about shooting elephants! Just goes to show, what the public sees is often nothing like what the artist intended.
