Elisa's Giant Squid Story and Painting

"Elisa's Giant Squid"

24"x60" Oil and Enamel on Canvas

2012

Elisa Minton was five years old in 1990.  She was from Sheyenne, North Dakota and went to school down the road in New Rockford.  This painting takes place in this little girl’s vivid imagination after she took a look in a book about the ocean in her elementary school library. 

Her class went to the library once a week.  Elisa and each of her classmates were allowed to take home two books a week.  She sat down at a table at the center of the large room and began to look at a book about the ocean.  Elisa loved books about the ocean and its creatures.

The library had dark blue carpet and she often daydreamed that it was the deep blue ocean.  The wooden table that she sat at was her vessel and she was the captain. Elisa looked at the book, mostly at the pictures.  She would try to make out as many words as she could.  A picture of a giant squid that washed up on an ocean shore in Japan soon caught her imagination.  People stood around it like it was some type of alien.

Elisa began to imagine the giant squid coming to life and swimming around in the blue carpet that surrounded her.  The squid was quite ugly in the picture so she imagined it as something that was a bit friendlier.  She imagined a pink squid with pretty blue eyes.