Art Drop #20: Portrait of a Rabbit
Bringing the class bunny (or Ewok?) home for the holidays.
From a very early age our daughter loved bunnies. It is hard to overstate the sheer joy and delight when her class adopted a pet bunny named Trixie in October… a rabbit that would hop around the classroom, nibble classwork and get into adorable trouble. On those “I don’t want to go to school” mornings, just the promise of Trixie waiting for love and attention was the balm necessary to get in the car and go to school.
So it was a foregone conclusion that we’d be taking Trixie home for the holidays. No, we couldn’t travel to visit friends or family, we had a bunny to take care of. On the day before winter break she was put into a cage that would fit our car, we were given some hay and kibble and litter to get started with, and suddenly we had the beloved class bunny in our possession, not to mention a lot of responsibility.
At first glance you might be thinking – that’s no bunny! But Trixie is no ordinary bunny. She is a Lionhead bunny. Their long beautiful wool (not fur) requires extensive upkeep, brushing and combing ideally every two days, but no longer than a week between grooming sessions otherwise their wool will knot and mat and then other problems develop.
Bringing Trixie home meant dropping all non-essential tasks in the days before Christmas and suddenly getting up to speed on all things rabbit. We had The Rabbit Handbook out from the library. I went deep into Rabbit Reddit and I conferred extensively with ChatGPT.
You see, Trixie wasn’t drinking any water. Day after day would go by and the level in her water bottle wouldn’t go down. Did she not like the taste of our water? I offered her a bowl of water and she let her displeasure know, hopping as far away from the bowl as possible like I was insulting her! Were we going to have a dehydrated bunny on our hands? Was she heading towards kidney failure?
A quick Google search for “bunny not drinking water” led me down a rabbit hole of diseases to look out for. Signs of dehydration include sunken eyes, but I couldn’t even see them underneath her luscious Chewbacca eyebrows!
But Rabbit Reddit did save the day. Some rabbits just don’t drink a lot of water, they get their water from fresh greens and Trixie was certainly enjoying her parsley, cilantro, kale and endive. Over time she started to really relax and get used to our house, and a few days later she started drinking from her water bottle again. The sheer relief of Trixie drinking water was the Christmas present we all needed. Because now we could stop worrying and fully enjoy her.
Just look at this thing!
“She looks like a dust mop!” declared my mom, and she’s not wrong! “Is that a guinea pig?” asked my brother. She has a reverse mullet (party in the front, business in the back). Trixie manages to not only resemble Ewoks and Wookies but looks beautiful while doing so. Her tutu of floof resembles the fringe on a rug. Her coloration is a warm chocolate brown on her back, a milky Earl Grey tea where she has her long wool, with charcoal gray ears expressively emerging from her fancy hairdo. It’s quite a look!
Can I share with you the pleasure of sinking your fingers into her big warm cheek fluffs and feel her leaning into the touch of your fingertips? The warmth, the softness, the sweetness….!
Each night she gets zoomies around 8:30pm, like a golden retriever, and also flops onto her side like a dog. She looks outside with wistful curiosity, and her munching of cilantro is a soothing ASMR experience that would break the internet if we had the right microphone to record her. Was there any doubt she’d feature in our first art drop of 2025?
Art Drop #20
So in celebration of Trixie, we present Art Drop #20. Yes, it’s a portrait of this very special rabbit who has taken over our lives these last ten days. It’s no easy feat to gently wrangle a bunny into portrait-worthy sunlight, and thankfully she just hopped into position on her own, curiously looking out the window and taking in the view. Isn’t she a character?
Trixie, December 2024
West Stockbridge, MA, USA
by Diana Pappas
Prints of this photograph are only available through January 7, 2025, with no further production of this work for at least a year. The button below takes you to the art drop page on our website where you can learn all about the paper, sizes, and pricing – but in short we are keeping these on the smaller side with 11 x 14” being the largest available, and three different papers to choose from including a recycled option.
For something different this month, if you become a paid subscriber to our publication (annual plans only) you can request any two of the unique one-of-a-kind instant prints shown below. First come, first served!
Thanks for reading! We can’t resist wishing you a very Hoppy New Year!
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Wow, that is something!
She's gorgeous - and so are the pictures! I'd love to see what she was snapping in the photo at the end there...