Okay, I'm not sure I've ever seen a wolf. At the Wolf Woods of the Minnesota Zoo, I've seen... woods. At the Cascadia Trail at Washington Park Zoo, Portland, I've seen... trail. And trees. At the Anchorage Zoo I might have seen a tuft of fur hanging off the brush. Or it might have drifted over the fence from the moose. A few years ago, I visited my first pottery professor down in southeastern Minnesota. He and his wife took us for a walk on their property, and showed us black, scary-looking objects on the path. "Wolf scat," they told us.
Still no wolves, though.
But wolves hold a fascination with us. There were always rumors around in winter, when I was a kid, about how wolves were coming back to Wisconsin. Someone had heard howling, someone had seen tracks out snowmobiling, someone else's cow dog was half "brush wolf." (Possibly coyote, but more likely the neighbor's German shepherd had jumped the fence.) Wolves hold a large place in our imagination, from children's stories to t-shirt art to wildlife movies.
So I keep getting requests for wolf pots. And I huff and puff and say how hard they are to draw right (one false line and it's a schnauzer). But I think I've finally got a wolf that looks like a wolf, and I'm painting them on dinner and dessert plates, tall mugs and tumblers.
They're a howling success...