Scott Musgrove

"This painting was done for my show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery. It’s part of a series of paintings and sculptures of extinct North American animals that I’ve been working on for a while now. With this one in particular I was thinking about how people will kill animals for their fur to use as coats, rugs, etc. and realized that some people (at least in the past) look at animals as just raw materials for their own vanity. So, I’m assuming that this species was hunted into extinction so people could re-upholster their living room chairs." - Scott Musgrove 

I never intended to discover numerous heretofore unidentified animal species and, thereby, turn the scientific community on its ear. These discoveries, and my theories of how they came to be, have won me few friends and many enemies among experts in the fields of History, Biology, Zoology and the Culinary Arts.…I don’t have many friends in Mathematics either. When one reports honestly from the front lines of Evolutionary Biology, one should be prepared to ruffle a few feathers.

In challenging beloved scientific assumptions and throwing a Rhesus monkey wrench into the grinding machinery of the status quo, I have sparked a powder keg of reflexive anger from legions of zoological theorists whose scientific essays and thesis papers now appear, if not merely wide of the mark, patently absurd in the revelatory glare of my newly introduced fauna. They can no better account for the Salvelinus Fontinalis Hirsutus (Hairy Brook Trout) than they can the Elliptical Equine, or any of my newly discovered animal species lodged so high in the tree of life. No matter what your local zookeeper says, these are no mere evolutionary weeds – they are leaves on the Tree of life (Life Tree Leaves) that, sadly, have fallen before their time in the cruel summer of our fertile planet.

I am Scott Musgrove. I read these tree leaves.