Feed Every Bunny

Owl say

This week I thought about how the things we benefit from often fade into the background of our lives. Often we forget to notice, appreciate and support the things (and people) that support us. Until we lose them. Or something causes us to remember them.

Health for instance. I've spent years breathing and taking that for granted. Breathing just happened. I didn't have to do anything. Since having had covid in early May my breathing has been in an ongoing recovery process and I've had to do stuff. And I am doing better enough to appreciate deep breaths when they happen! Breathing easily is such a nice luxury - I remember now!

Access to food is another example. The ending of SNAP benefits that the Republicans caused in 2025 has now resulted in more than 770,000 children being denied access to food¹. And that hurts my soul. It also feels too familiar....

When I was about 5 years old I was put into my grandmother's primary care because my biological parents were abusive. Yet the state of Oklahoma (where I lived at the time) besides moving me to grandma's also mandated that I spend one weekend a month with my biological parents. As a child I literally called these weekends “visits to hell”.

On those hellish weekends I would go from my grandmother's house, where there were 3 regular yummy meals each day, to my biological parents house where food was withheld or reluctantly given contingent upon how they felt about me/my behavior at any given moment.

As a deaf child, who didn't get hearing aids until age 8, I often didn't hear them speaking. This was perceived by them as being “disrespectful” so … no lunch.

This withholding of food had nothing to do with whether my biological parents had enough money for food. They had plenty of money. There was plenty of food in the refrigerator and pantry. The on/off food access was about domination and control.

[Yes, I’ve had the therapy… I had a wonderful grandmother. I was informally adopted later by very good people who became my chosen family. I had, and have, lots of love in my life… thank goodness.]

Fast forward to a year ago, summer 2025, when I saw that the Republicans were passing a bill that would cause millions of people - many of them children - to lose access to food (and healthcare) through no fault of their own my blood boiled. This deliberate act of food withdrawal, of domination and control by the Republicans over the people they'd decided weren't “good enough”, felt creepily familiar.

In response I began working on a painting… which, a year later, is currently on exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars. Here’s my finished painting, more about how I got there in a sec…

Feed Every Bunny
By Clancy
4 feet tall, 28 inches wide
Acrylic on flat canvas

… A year ago, in order to think about food access from a different, less blood boiling, perspective I dived into the history of eating utensils.

I'm very generally summing up some of what I've read: as humans discovered fire, and then began to cook food² we developed tools like chopsticks to stir or hold food as it cooked over the fire. That led to the use of chopsticks to also eat the warm food. Smaller chunks of food cooked faster and smaller bites were easier to eat… which eventually led to the development and use of the table knife. The “spoon”, a shell with a handle attached or a carved wooden shape, was also an early utensil advance. The fork, however, was quite controversial and took much longer to become normalized. In Mideaval times the fork was considered sinful (it looked like a devil's pitchfork to them) or a pretentious personal vanity. The very slow adoption of the fork as ordinary tableware was due to the prevailing beliefs and norms in certain regions.³

(People… sigh 🤦‍♀️)

Back in our modern era, also on the topic of eating, I read about developments internationally to make food access a human right⁴. I read about food access during wars and other disasters (World Central Kitchen!). I read about local food banks and food bank efforts⁵.

All of those readings ran through my head like rabbits in a field. So I painted huge eating utensils, with the fork deliberately in the center, and a rabbit graffiti artist advocating that we Feed Every Bunny.

The process of painting became a reminder to be grateful for everyone involved in food harvesting, food preparing, food delivering… for everyone who makes food available for as many of us as possible. Thank you!⁶

My painting Feed Every Bunny is the largest painting in my exhibit. It's that important. To illustrate the size here's a photo from my exhibit.

You can see the rest of my exhibit artworks via this link (click to enlarge the images). My work is represented by Caplan Art Designs and they can be contacted here with questions.

Similarly to food access, I care deeply about access to books and education for all people and especially children. Which is why I have all of my 24 children's books freely available via Storyberries.com - link for all 24 here.

This week Storyberries features my experimental art books! You can access them free via this link. Here's a sampler of some of my featured stories which you can access here:

Experimental Art Books written and illustrated by Clancy on Storyberries.com

Besides access to food and books I deeply appreciate access to good quality art supplies. I've been asked about some of the pens and inks I use on the drawings I share here in A.M. Sketching. Here's a video of me talking about my TWISBY pen and demonstrating refilling it with one of the blue-grey inks I like.

Here’s the resource links promised in the video:

https://www.eryngiumpa...​ [In store shopping only]

https://oblationpapers...​. [Both in store and online shopping. This is a direct link to a TWISBY pen like the one in my video.]

https://www.twsbi.com/...​ [Online shopping]

Here's a drawing I did with the TWISBY pen and ink which I refilled in the video - specifically the crosshatching on the tree was done with the TWISBY.

The owl librarian drawing I shared earlier in this post was done with just the Sailor pen, shown in the video, plus a waterbrush to do a smear-effect shading.

This drawing below was done with both pens. The extra fine TWISBY for the rain and the Sailor for everything else. The ink I chose to put in my Sailor pen will smear in water so I used the smear-effect to make shading on the leaf and rabbits.

The turtle drawing was done with my TWISBY pen filled with the ink shown in the video. Because that blue-grey ink does not smear in water I can paint over the drawing with my gouache colors and then firm up the drawing with the ink again when the paint is dry.

Because all three of these feed us: food, literature and visual art… food keeps us physically alive but literature, music, art (all of the arts) help us feel alive (and want to stay alive)… I've made a bookmark with my drawing of a rabbit having lunch under a picnic tree - link here.

Please hang in there today and I hope you had a good breakfast and will have a very good lunch.

1. Some details about the removal of SNAP benefits: https://www.propublica.org/article/snap-benefits-children-food-stamps

2. Details about the use of fire, the development of cooking and the human brain: https://www.amnh.org/explore/science-topics/microbiome-health/fire-cooking-human-evolution

3. More about eating utensils and the radical revolutionary fork: https://foodculturebites.com/from-fingers-to-forks/

4. About the United Nations efforts to make food access a human right: https://www.ohchr.org/en/food

5. A food bank locator website: https://www.feedingamerica.org/find-your-local-foodbank

6. A beautiful short film about being grateful for food… (in Japanese but with English subtitles)