Oil on linen painting titled Elephant Graveyard, Kenya, by Joellyn T. Duesberry. The painting depicts an African landscape with a vividly colored sky and elephant graveyard in the foreground. A partially decayed elephant is on the right, across from a group of older elephants, still alive, on the left. The living elephants have presumably returned to the bones of their ancestors. Multiple vultures sit atop the elephant bones.
Elephant Graveyard, Kenya depicts a scene the artist, Joellyn Duesberry, witnessed while traveling in Africa shortly after 9/11. It forms one half of a diptych painting displayed in juxtaposition with Duesberry's work titled Memory Time Lapse, Ground Zero NYC.
Acclaimed as a plein air painter and adventurous colorist, Joellyn Duesberry was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. After studying painting and art history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, she pursued a graduate degree at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York City.
In the late 1990s, Duesberry received a six-month grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to be a part of the World Views program as an artist in residence. Working out of a studio space in the World Trade Center, Duesberry produced a series of cityscapes from vantage points of the North Tower’s 91st floor.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Duesberry grieved the loss of innocent lives, some of them friends, as well as the physical buildings, whose “maze of cubes,” extraordinary vistas, and elongated shadows she had so recently painted. On several occasions, she ventured to the World Trade Center site to see its ravaged condition.
Soon after, she traveled to Kenya where she witnessed a herd of elephants responding to the death of a member of the herd. This scene was so compelling it called to mind the devastation she had recently witnessed at Ground Zero. An idea took root in the form of corresponding canvases—Memory Time Lapse and Elephant Graveyard—which she thereafter painted at a scale commensurate with the horror and grief she was feeling.