When SEE commissioned local artist (and co-author of our weekly “Art Box” column) to create a series of portraits of four of the party leaders in this year’s federal election, we gave her one overriding guideline: the last thing we wanted, we said, was the traditional kind of painting you see in the corridors of the House of Commons.
We definitely weren’t expecting Mandy to deliver the fanciful political bestiary that you see on this page — all of them inspired by animals native to Alberta — but we were delighted by the results. “I used to draw a lot of political cartoons when I was in high school, just for my own amusement,” she says, “but I haven’t done it for a while. This is actually kind of the reverse of the way I usually work — usually I start off with an abstract image and then try to find a way to make it into something individual, but here I had to begin with these specific faces and then turn them into something funny.”
Espezel’s images are more affectionate than the typical political caricature, as you’ll discover as she plays zookeeper and takes us on a guided tour through SEE’s election menagerie.
