Through life-sized drawings of endangered species, Donalyn Schofield pays tribute to the last animals of a kind. Drawings of a California condor, of which over three-hundred still exist in the wild, and Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhino, directly mirror the monumental scale of these beautiful creatures, forcing viewers to contemplate the magnitude of both their presence in, and absence from our world. Since the 1970’s Schofield has used her work to call attention to environmental concerns, focusing particularly on endangered species and the economics of poaching, industrial acceleration, and climate change.

Schofield has always enjoyed working on a large scale and envisions the impact of her life-sized drawings as being similar to a visit to a natural history museum, where one comes face-to-face with dinosaurs, elephants, and other creatures of epic proportions. To achieve her monumental vision, she set up a temporary studio in an empty room in the New Braintree Town Hall with walls large enough to accommodate a twelve-foot drawing surface. She also took advantage of the public setting to provide information to passersby about why she had chosen to draw these animals.

In addition to a new space, Schofield experimented with new materials and techniques to complete these pieces. Working on Tyvek for the first time, she found she was able to create an impressive tonal range using lithographic crayons in her portrait of Sudan. After completing the rhinoceros in black and white, she knew she wanted to use more color and texture to portray the details of the condor. That final piece is a collage of materials. The feathers are constructed from paste paper and paper coverings peeled from old foam core panels; the head is rendered in brilliant Prismacolor pencils; and the metallic transmitter tags, used to track the birds in the wild, are made from pieces of silver and red plastic films with self-adhesive backing.

Schofield creates large work that posits equally large questions. She hopes viewers of these drawings will contemplate our place in the world relative to Sudan, the very last of a species that has existed for millions of years. She remarks, “We have changed this very complex world dramatically and we are now starting to experience devastating results. We and our earth are intrinsically interconnected. Will we be the last of our species?”