Fantastic Animals

Description for blind and low-vision visitors

Nine small horizontal canvases are mounted edge to edge inside a single wooden box frame, in three rows of three. The wood is a warm mid brown, and the canvases sit back from its front edge, so the inner faces of the box show as a dark band around them. Eight of the nine are painted over a pale cream ground worked with short hatched strokes of colour, and each holds one or two creatures. In the top row, the left panel carries a long sea serpent coiled diagonally across the canvas. Its dark blue-green head opens into jaws full of white teeth, an orange and red crest streams back from it, and its body is banded in purple, ochre, blue and yellow, with fins of pink and red. A small blue serpent spotted with yellow curls up at the upper left, and green fronds rise from the bottom edge. The middle panel holds a winged dragon with purple bat wings and a long dark tail curling at the left. Its head, at the right, has a yellow eye and a long open snout lined with teeth, and below it a smaller lizard with a beaked purple head and a blue body spotted with red walks along a lilac band. In the right panel a large fish faces right, its body covered in overlapping scales of red, blue, orange, green and yellow. Its salmon head ends in long narrow jaws, dark teal dotted with white and lined with red, and three round tufted forms float around it in pink, blue and orange. In the middle row, the left panel shows a crested lizard with open red jaws, its pink body marked with large ringed spots, wrapped around a dark green tree trunk that forks across the canvas. Small pale blue insects sit on the trunk, and a long-legged purple insect hovers at the lower left. The centre panel is the only one with a flat ground, a smooth sky blue. A large bird stands on a brown branch that crosses from the lower left, its head striped in orange and yellow, its curved beak black and red, and a crest of curling black plumes rising behind. Its plumage is built from dotted scales of red, pink, blue, green and yellow, and its tail fans out to the lower right. Black ants climb the branch, and green palm fronds spread at the left. The right panel holds a four-legged dragon facing right, its head red with an open toothed mouth and a green crest, its body a patchwork of purple, blue and orange under a scalloped green frill. A blue serpent with a dotted purple body rises from the lower right to face it. In the bottom row, the left panel shows a creature with a long green neck bent back like a swan's, a beaked head with a yellow eye, and a domed body patterned like a tortoise shell in brown, orange and purple bands, with a purple bat wing on its back. Its clawed feet grip a dark branch. The middle panel holds a green dragon climbing diagonally up a bright green leaf, its scaled body crested with a row of red and yellow spines, its blue horned head open-mouthed at the upper right. A small red-winged creature flies above. In the right panel a large fish with a purple head, a round yellow eye and wide jaws full of teeth curls around the canvas, a spiked green crest along its back and its dark tail at the upper right, while a smaller fish swims up toward it from the lower left.