This piece started life as an ad for "Gorilla" brand shoes which I spotted in a store window in downtown Winnipeg, sometime around 1990. The store owner's son saw me taking a photo of it from the sidewalk, came out to ask me what I was doing, and would up taking the cardboard display out of his window and giving it to me! I still have it in my basement somewhere...
The image appealed to me on two levels: first was the way the overtly phallic shoe was also, on closer inspection, vulvic too. Second was the craziness of painting an angry "animal" in a "natural" setting attacking a manufactured human artifact - all done as an advertisement.
This is the sixth version I've done of this image over the years - a couple of earlier versions can be seen in the "Early Paintings" and "Early Photo Based" galleries linked on the righthand sidebar.