About the Komodo Dragon Drawing
I had read about Komodo Dragons (Varanus komodoensis) for most of my life and had seen several subadults in zoos, but I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to observe them in the wild. In 2015, I visited Komodo and then Rinca the following day, encountering these remarkable lizards in the island landscapes where they evolved.
Seeing them there made their size, alertness, and intelligence feel very different from anything I had experienced observing them in captivity. It also made me wonder about the ancient relationship between Komodo Dragons and Homo floresiensis, the small-bodied hominins that once inhabited nearby Flores where the dragons used to live. I found myself imagining an uneasy coexistence in which each might sometimes have viewed the other as either danger or opportunity- perhaps not entirely unlike the complex relationship between Agta people and Reticulated Pythons in the Philippines.
In Komodo, I wanted to emphasize the animal’s watchful intelligence and physical presence rather than portray it simply as a fearsome predator. The close profile draws attention to the alert eye, powerful head, loose folds of skin, and extraordinary detail of the scales.
I incorporated the handwritten common and scientific names directly into the drawing as a deliberate reference to the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural-history illustration, in which art, identification, and scientific observation were often presented together.
Komodo is a graphite pencil Komodo Dragon drawing by Michael E. Dorcas for Tantilla Art.