Eastern Siberian Gray Fox or White Wolf Spirit

ARTIST: William Louis ("Bill") McDonald Senior.

COMPANY: Argonaut-GreyWolf.

CLIENT: A Laguna Beach family whose middle son was dying. The dad was a school district administrator and mom was a counselor. Their middle son had acquired both the childhood lung cancer genes and the actual illness from all of the heavy second-hand tobacco smoke that permeated their otherwise idyllic and "Lost Horizons" neighborhood of their Shangri-La Laguna Canyon neighborhood of Canyon Acres just off Laguna Canyon (State Highway 133).

The family was gathered around the boy. All of the relatives had arrived. I brought Elizabeth Taylor's and Kenny Roger's personal Santa and Mrs. Claus (Preston and Dixie Hibbard who were also well known to the LA Times). The boy's older brother handed me his bottle of ink and a paper. The boy asked for a magical Anime wolf or fox, but it had to be real.

YEAR: 1981, June, when I was nineteen.

WEBSITE: www.alienufoart.com/alien-ufo-…

WEBSITE: www.deviantart.com/argonaut-gr…

WEBSITE: argonaut-greywolf.artstation.c…

PROJECT OR PURPOSE: To create a "Make a Wish" experience by drawing this animal from my memory at this child's command, either an aetherical gracile white wolf, or a magical northeast Asian fox for an eleven-year-old boy in the last day-or-two of his life, as he watched me. And I made him help.

We drew it from memory, and the more this magical canid came together, the more I thought the kid might be in some sort of spiritual touch with some ancient Siberian Yakut tribal "Toyon Sa-hyl" spirit of the "Valiant Lord Fox" or "Fox Chief."

In Japan the Kitsune are believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers. They are a type of yōkai. The word kitsune is sometimes translated as 'fox spirit', which is actually a broader folkloric category.

My models were the ancient Siberian Yakut tribal "Toyon Sa-hyl" spirit of the "Valiant Lord Fox" or "Fox Chief," the Japanese kitsune 'fox spirit,' and Inari Ōkami (Japanese: 稲荷大神), also called Ō-Inari (大稲荷), is the Japanese kami of foxes.

MEDIA: Black Higgins India ink with Pentel felt-tips and quill point pen nibs.

NOTES: I've withheld the names of the boy, his two brothers and parents as all these many years later, they still suffer the memories and the guilt. Their son died because the two of them (The parents) smoked like a pair of chimneys. Four days later, the young man died. We were all gathered around. His death was . . . chaotic . . . and not anything I wish to describe further. The family were and remain very private.

LOCATION: Canyon Acres, Laguna Beach, California, USA.