Art and Self-Expression Theme Analysis

Both Ivan the gorilla and Julia, the mall cleaner’s 10-year-old daughter, are artists. Ivan used to use mud as a drawing medium when he was an infant still living in the wild, but in the present, he only makes crayon drawings to sell in the mall’s gift shop. Julia, meanwhile, is a budding artist who encourages Ivan in his love of art. When the mall owner, Mack, purchases the baby elephant Ruby, Ivan realizes that his art doesn’t just have to be something that makes money for the mall—rather, he can use his art to help secure a better future for Ruby. Through Ivan’s changing relationship to his artwork, the novel positions art as something capable of connecting people (and animals) across all sorts of divides. Art, the novel suggests, can help beings communicate, heal from trauma, and create change.

Art, the novel shows, can help beings feel more secure in their identities. Ivan has always been an artist. Gorilla parents, he explains, don’t name their babies until they show their parents something about who they are. And baby Ivan loved drawing with mud as an infant, earning him the name “Mud” among his family members. This name, he tells readers, meant “everything” to him when he was a baby, as it told Ivan that he was an artist. While Ivan no longer goes by the name Mud when he’s at the mall, he still uses art to connect with his past. When he draws with crayons, markers, or finger paints, he explains that he “feels quiet inside.” Making art is a way for Ivan to cope with a difficult life—it reminds him of who he once was and who he might be able to be in the future. And importantly, Ivan is proud of his identity as an artist in a way that he’s not able to be proud of some of his other identity markers, such as being a silverback gorilla (which he insists he can’t really be without someone to protect, for instance).

Art can also help people (and animals) connect and communicate with one another. Ivan and Julia share a special bond because they’re both artists. They may have different ways of approaching their art—Julia draws things from her imagination, while Ivan draws objects in his domain—but they both appreciate the other’s art. Julia, for her part, is the only human for much of the novel who’s able (or, for that matter, willing) to figure out what Ivan has drawn on any given day. While Mack and even George (the mall cleaner) insist that Ivan only draws “scribbles,” Julia takes the time to study Ivan’s drawings and identify them as depictions of bananas or beetles. This makes Ivan feel understood in a way that nothing else does. This is why, when Ivan paints a giant mural intended to go on a billboard, he decides to show his work to Julia first. As a fellow artist, she’s is the only one Ivan trusts to realize what he’s trying to do—and to help him carry out his vision of seeing his painting on a billboard.

Ivan’s billboard painting shows that art isn’t just something that helps beings bond with others or feel good about themselves—art can also help agitate for change. Ivan comes up with the idea for the billboard when he sees how the original billboard functions: it draws passersby in and shows them what to expect at the mall. Ivan realizes he can use a billboard to convey something entirely different: that Ruby belongs in a zoo, not at the mall. Some of the media attention that Ivan’s billboard painting attracts has to do with the fact that Ivan, a gorilla, conceived of and executed such an involved idea. Ivan notes that plenty of humans don’t believe gorillas are capable of such high-level thinking, so it’s a shock for some that Ivan could plan and paint such a massive piece of work. But this in and of itself speaks to the power of art to humanize an artist—Ivan becomes a much more sympathetic figure to humans when they see what he can paint, and that his paintings aren’t just scribbles. Furthermore, the success of Ivan’s billboard plan portrays art as an agent of change. His billboard painting is what begins to raise awareness of his and Ruby’s plight at the mall, eventually leading to protests, media attention, and ultimately animal welfare inspections that culminate in Ivan and Ruby being transferred to the zoo—Ivan’s goal from the beginning.

Art, the novel shows, can be many different things to many different beings. It can bring individual artists peace and happiness, and it can also help those artists improve their situations. When the novel ends after Ivan paints a massive white wall at the zoo with fresh mud—just for the fun of it—it suggests finally that art can help a person return to their roots. Painting with mud helps Ivan get a little bit closer to the gorilla he was as an infant—and it suggests that, perhaps most importantly, art can help a person heal and reconnect with a past version of themselves.