Announcement – until March 31, vote for the Ursa Major Awards to support the best works of furry fandom!

If you’re a talking animal on social media, Furry Twitter is the place to be. And if you aren’t on there yet, or if you’re new, it may seem like a perplexing jungle of stunning art, cute fursuits, drama, social commentary, memes, nature videos, hitting on corporate mascots, and crazy happenings with a huge fandom of friends who have fun like nobody else. Finding the good stuff could use a guide to bushwhack through the wilderness. Wouldn’t it be cool to get an article series about entertaining and well curated accounts?

These will ask the account owners a few short questions about what they do. Enjoy whether they’re new, or you like learning more about stuff you already love.

UNINTENTIONAL FURRIES is the connection for fandom right now to thousands of years of art history. Their profile pic says it all… it’s the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel. This is a lion-headed figure carved out of mammoth ivory, from 38,000 BC, discovered in a cave in Germany. It’s the oldest known anthropomorphic animal carving in the world, and the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art. From a university archaeology class: “What was really striking about the sculptor of the Lion Man sculptor is that he or she had a mind capable of imagination rather than simply representing real forms. The individual had to have a brain powerful enough to think beyond what was presented to it in everyday life”. Theartnewspaper.com says: “Until recently it was thought that religions developed only after the appearance of writing let early peoples “conceive ideas of the supernatural”. The Lion Man challenges that notion.”

Here’s @digotron2000 (AKA Diego) to tell you more about his virtual museum:

(DPP): What’s the story of your account… what exactly is it for, in your words? Was there anything that inspired you to start it? Is there anything special about how you curate, and what’s it like to run in general?

(Unintentional Furries): To me, the purpose of this account is to compare classical and fine art with furry art, and look at animal headed / anthropomorphized creatures throughout history. There’s just a lot of parallels between furries now and stuff of the past. Also, I feel furries get a bad rap in the public eye and in the art world, meanwhile similar art and elements of culture have existed throughout history and are well respected. Freakin’ Pablo Picasso had a fursona (just look up “Picasso minotaur”.)

(From Apollo Magazine, “What the Minotaur can tell us about Picasso” by Tim Smith-Laing:)

“Picasso once said, ‘If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.’ … Monstrosity and monstering are important in this show. Monstrosity is itself a kind of play: a space in which things combine and recombine, altering each other in one body that is both in concert and in competition with itself. Monstering, especially the kind of self-monstering that Picasso engaged in, is another form of deep play – a kind of equivocality in which one gets to say and be two things at once. And the Minotaur is the perfect equivocal kind of monster, the ideal vehicle for Picasso’s self -mythologising. From the 1930s onward, it became an important alter ego for Picasso, who knew full well that he could be a monster, above all to women.”

The way I curate is basically trying to find art I like, with any way that I can count it as furry, and I end up finding a lot of cool art and artists that I didn’t know about before. Most of the stuff I find is through museum archives, as well as Tumblr and Pinterest.

Running it has been wild, especially at the start. It blew up pretty fast and I’m still not used to people actually paying attention to me on the internet. I have been running a non-furry art/aesthetic blog on Tumblr for years but it never got much attention, until one day I thought hey, why not do this but for furries?

2) Would you like to talk about who’s behind the account?

Before starting this I really wasn’t that much of a furry, and I’m still not (but the more I’m in contact with the fandom it seems like the more of one I become). There were a few furry artists I liked, and I occasionally drew anthro animals, but that wasn’t my main focus. In fact a few years ago I straight up didn’t like furries. I thought they were all weird and gross, but as I came to actually know some of them I realized they weren’t so bad.

As for myself as a person, I’m a 19-year old who just likes art. I’m not an expert or anything, I’m figuring this all out as it goes. Also, I’m an artist myself and I’m open for commissions. (Instagram with some of my art: digotron2000)

3) What are your “greatest hits” (and why)?

Why? I have no idea why some of them get way more popular than others. But here’s a few that did pretty well:

Angel with triple wings and a white leopard’s head. Gouache painting by an Indian artist, Islamic Mughal Empire ~ ca.1750 pic.twitter.com/GsYkUWE7MA — unintentional furries (@ancientfurries) March 12, 2019

David Groff ‘87 via chromeandlightning on tumblr pic.twitter.com/ZmfJ1x7p7Y — unintentional furries (@ancientfurries) January 1, 2019

Huehuecoyotl is the Aztec god of storytelling, music, dance, merriment, mischief and uninhibited sexuality. Known for being a trickster, playing pranks which would often backfire. He is a frequent shape-shifter, capable of transforming between human and animal as well as genders pic.twitter.com/qobUVrTEFH — unintentional furries (@ancientfurries) March 6, 2019

The Smoking Cricket, Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel, 1910 pic.twitter.com/MbZBe4Sy0c — unintentional furries (@ancientfurries) December 20, 2018

4) Would you recommend any other good furry accounts?

I can’t say I know too many, but I guess I’ll just shout out some furry artists I have been digging who kind of got me into all this, and led me down this path: Paul Peng, Eli Spencer, and Gatto Dyboski (catboypower).

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, please follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon.