Phil Cooper / Painting Chimera #6

Phil Cooper, Fossil, 40cm x 40cm, acrylic on paper

‘Hey,’ said Kyp, and he touched Atticus very lightly with his hand. ‘Back home there’s this museum. It’s full of great stuff. It’s got a dressed flea and the horn of a narwhal. It’s got snakes in great big tanks and dinosaur bones and dodos, but there’s nothing like you there. There’s a circus me and Sprat would go to, Fatty Barnstorm’s. He’s got a tiger called Pinstripe and there’s Petula, the human projectile. She gets fired from a cannon. People ooh and ahh, but if they saw you, Atticus, if they saw you, they wouldn’t believe their eyes.’

Chimera Book 1 / Chapter 10 – Caramels & Coconut Cracknell

“As usual, with this chapter, I was spoilt for choice with so many vivid images conjured by the words. In the end, I chose to depict a fossilised dinosaur from the museum Kyp describes. I have very fond memories of going to the local museum with my grandmother when I was a little boy. I was completely entranced by the butterflies and insects in glass cases, a giant stuffed lion called Nelson. and the rather dusty, hushed gloom of the galleries. It was a magical place, a place of extraordinary things, like postcards from strange worlds that one day I might visit…“

Phil Cooper, November 2020