Opossum and Rat was an artwork that Artist Ty Meier painted as a birthday present for a close friend who had had pet rats when she was younger, then, when she was older, she had to sell a house but was very concerned about an Opossum family living underneath it. Would the new owners kill it? Would it be okay? She successfully moved the Opossum family out, but Ty found the situation charming and drew his first opossum.
As an experiment he had prints of the artwork made for an art market and was astonished when they were very popular, kicking off his interest and joy in the creating artworks of humbler trash animals amongst us. He’s had a thousand art market conversations about Opossums and hears reoccurring themes, for instance, many people carry rubber gloves in their cars so that if they see an opossum dead on the side of the road they can check it for babies. Ty hears much about not being able to carry rabies, about being the only North American marsupials, about eating ticks, and he’s learned that if a person doesn’t like opossums they probably own horses because opossums carry a parasite called Sarcocystis neurona which is very dangerous for horses. One delightful anecdote has a young woman turning on her bedroom light, startling the opossum hanging upside down outside her window.
Mostly what Ty loves is how dopey and uncharismatic they are, and he wonders at the defense mechanism of playing dead having worked it’s way through evolution, but mostly he likes the metaphor of the mom trudging along with all the babies on her back, trying to take care of everyone.
This 8”x10” artwork started as a pen-and-ink drawing in Ty’s sketchbook. He watercolored it, framed it and gave it to his friend. He had prints made and mounted one of them to this hand-painted wooden craft board, then brushed it with a glossy acrylic to give it that sparking raised texture, and finally lacquered it.