4

Cody VanWinkle

Did you have previous associations with this number before making this work?

So many! Four is a square and so it's solid and sturdy. I liked the idea of doing one thing four different ways. The symmetry of that appealed to me. Then again, I also like the recurrence of four types of things. Four elements, four seasons, four this, four that...

What inspired you to make this piece?

I'm a teacher and I often get ideas that pop up in class. We were recently reading about mythological beasts, and it crossed my mind to create an animal that's a chimera-style hybrid mashup thingy, made from four animals. I've been interested in randomly generated things lately, so I found an online random animal generator and had it give me my four animals to combine. They were porpoise, horse, hedgehog, and civet. I used the horse body, gave it a porpoise head and tail, and of course the hedgehog back. But what about the civet? Who even knows what a civet is? Well, the only thing I know about a civet is that it's some kind of wild cat thingy in the jungle, and it's how they make kopi luwak, an outrageously high-end coffee. Some rodent eats coffee cherries, and then the civet eats the rodent. Humans dig through the civet's droppings to harvest the coffee bean, wash it, roast it, and sell it as an extremely expensive delicacy. So the civet literally shits money. That's all I know about it. And so that's its contribution to my mythological beast.

It seemed the most appropriate to set it in some ancient illuminated manuscript.

I researched what those illustrations looked like and tried to copy the style somewhat. The peasants collecting the money were a pretty late development but I'm really pleased with them.

Aside from a response to this number, what does the work say to you now that you've made it?

Well I suppose it tells me that I'm pretty cheeky. The finished piece is so colorful and cartoony. My intent wasn't to be funny but the random generator gave me an animal that's nothing other than a poop joke. With a different roll of the dice, this piece would be entirely different, so that's fun to think about. The process of drawing this also showed me that I really enjoy adapting other styles into my work. I think the finished product looks like equal parts silly Cody comic and semi-believable ancient tome.

Cody VanWinkle spent five years illustrating children's books at the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute. In 2017, he was published in And Lester Swam On, written by 21 rambunctious second graders. Someday, he would like to combine his passions for making ice cream and knitting.