(This piece was originally written for Furry Studies 2025 at Pacific Lutheran University on October 31, 2025, where I called in virtually and did the lecture in my fursuit.)

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much of an academic, so I want to give a sincere thank you to Belle Walston for doing a talk centering my work later today, allowing me get more granular in my work. My name is Mark Zubrovich. I’m a painter from New York. I mostly make paintings in oil and acrylic, some of which are pretty freaking large scale. My work is figurative in nature, though I am more in tune with the imagined body than any “real” person. I’ve been a furry since I was 13, I’ve been making art about furries and furryness since around 2016, and I have been out as a furry since around 2020.

Self Portrait (BRUCE GETS THEIR FLOWERS)

If you’ve seen any of my work at all you know I make art about dogs. I actually AM a dog right now! Much of the subject matter of my work in the last few years has been very centered around self portraiture, about the me you see and the doggie me you also see. My name is Bruce, everyone say hi to Bruce! Bruce is my fursona. He manifests in paintings and drawings mostly, but I'm also him in this softer, meatier space. I want us right now to think of Bruce as all these things at once. Painted object, dog-thing, fursuit, fursona, self portrait, thing suspended, object in mirror. When I paint about Bruce he and I are one, even though we sometimes appear as separate bodies. When I paint Bruce it's often on very rough and abrasive materials. I often mix sand and tiny rocks into my paint, and I’ll often sew into my canvases as I work on them with my machine or by hand. I'm enamored with base surfaces like jute linen and burlap, fabric with a weave so thick that its impossible to ignore as a viewer or the artist. Not only is this material diversity satisfying to work with (I love an unnecessary struggle in the studio) but I also enjoy it conceptually as a sort of tacit acknowledgment that I am made of STUFF. Of fabric and paint. It's Clement Greenberg with a hint of shapeshifting TF.

I find Bruce takes on a wily, sort of manic personality in the work. Which, if you know me, and especially if you see me really suited up, is true to life. He’s often up to some sort of mischief or engaging in some form of pleasure or cathartic pain. This is because Bruce was born out of trouble with my own body. I had my sense of smell damaged by COVID in 2020. A very cinematic broken foot in 2021, and some chronic bullshit with my insides beyond that. All this body trauma inside and out is what spurred me to hunker down and bring Bruce into the world. The need to be in new skin was too strong. And his design and attitude reflects this, I think! His bright blue fur and glowing yellow eyes betray a creature of great electricity. Bruce can canonically see, hear, and most importantly SMELL in a supernatural capacity. There’s something burning behind those pupils. Bruce is allowed to cry when he gets flowers as a gift. Bruce is allowed to pick the fruit in the garden. Bruce is allowed to gnaw at a wound until it’s a gaping hole in his guts. He WILL sniff you! Bruce is often a vehicle for exploring the pleasures of the senses, and the stuff he’s made of begs you to come in close, to tempt you with physical sensation. One of the reasons I’ve switched back to oil paint is because it stinks!!! Being a dog is a multi-sensory experience, and in the correct context (i.e. in person) a painting is as well.

I as a painter have found so much fruit in self-portraiture as a mode of operation because furry has so much fruit to offer the medium. We as people are always going to find narrative in figurative art, because bodies tell a story just by existing. And an artist depicting their own body using their own hands is always a political act, reflecting yourself upon the world you come from with the materials available to you. Furries must engage in this political act to become furries. Our community's barrier to entry is essentially and purposefully an act of self-actualization. The creation of a fursona demands curation, and it demands curation of things you desire to put upon yourself. Without the furry community to guide me I likely never would have ventured into self-portraiture, because I honestly don't see myself venturing into a journey of self-love without furries. Bruce is an allowance to shapeshift into situations and states of being that are able to reach deeper human depths precisely because Bruce is not a human. When you present yourself as a blue dog, people treat you like one. I used to get the “why dogs?” question a lot from people digesting my work, but in the advent of Bruce that question has all but disappeared. It is no longer a question, because I am clearly a dog. And it’s important to recognize that that growth came from further embracing furry as a community block. Before I was “out” as a furry I was still making work about anthro dogs, but it was also about baseball. Baseball dogs! I still look back fondly on that work and the Mutts vs Goodboys struggle, which culminated in a show at Bunker Projects in 2019, a space that has become so important to furries since! But I also look back on it and see an artist searching for a home (and hoping for some plausible deniability). It was an exploration of a world I felt shut out of, an attempt to “queer” something very heteromasculine but also homosocial. But it was also a way for me to paint about furries while having another conceptual through-line that ran ADJACENT to furries while also always being about something else. Being a furry is a very weird thing to be, and all of the new queer implications that were set before me took a long time to traverse before coming to the conclusion that denying myself the freedom to be an open furry was no longer a viable option.

If you read my bio then you know this already, but I find it gives context to my work to tell you about my upbringing. My father is a clergyman in the Catholic church. He’s a deacon, which means he takes on all duties of a Catholic priest except the ritual of transubstantiation that turns bread and wine into flesh and blood. And for most of my life my mother worked for a corporation called Rubies Costume Co, which was once the largest maker and distributor of Halloween costumes in the world. My childhood home was full of scraps of witch and jester costumes, clown makeup, and Catholic iconography (Jesus merch). I was doomed to be a painter and a furry being in this environment, so steeped in a world where objects are sacred and hold great transformative power. One of the things I've found so beautiful about exploring self portraiture through furry is it has unlocked in me a deep connection to animism. Catholics will never admit this but it’s an extremely animistic faith! Everything has a little symbol. EVERYTHING has a patron saint (one of which canonically has the head of a dog, shoutout Saint Christopher). You get the power of transubstantiation, the power my father is denied by being a married man, drilled into your head. How through ritual bread and wine become body and blood. When I was resident artist at the Liquitex corporation in 2022, they were beginning the process of phasing out their Cobalt Blue paint. This sent me into a panic, and I seized the moment. I asked them for all the Cobalt Blue they had on hand. I did not ask for a lot of Cobalt Blue. I asked for ALL THE COBALT BLUE THEY HAD. Cobalt is a rare element that is toxic and expensive and notoriously exploitative to mine, so it IS a good thing that they are phasing it out. But it caused that stir of panic in me because I realized I hold a sort of secret magical property in having my PERFECT blue. Bruce IS Cobalt. It is part of his stuff. Bruce is blue partly as a representation of him as a FURSONA, an entity from a netherworld separate from average Earthly dogginess. But he’s also blue because I fucking love the color blue. Making a fursona is about attaching attractive attributes to yourself and walking around with them as if they’re your real skin. The fursona is a clay sculpture built from magic stuff that is allowed to walk amongst other magic stuff. If you have ever been fursuiting you know that there is a moment where things CLICK in your brain, and for a moment you really are the thing you’re embodying. It’s total sublimation, a real shift of the image you see in the mirror. I really am a big blue puppy, and that sexy tiger suiter next to me really is a sexy tiger. I often desperately wish to pull myself from my own skin. To be anything but the flesh vessel I am now. Bruce is an imperfect but efficient pathway to this, as a thing on my body and as a painting practice.

I think furry is capable of engaging with these new pathways of self portraiture because we are true believers. You have to believe in the transhuman power of the fursona to really engage with furry, and I had to become a true believer to paint about it. This is why Bruce needed to be a fursuit. A fursuit is not required to engage with furry, but it was extremely necessary for me. I made my fursuit, and the process felt just as ritualistic as finding my perfect blue. I’m here right now at Furpocalypse engaging in this new pathway. I’m cobalt blue right now. I’ve only been doing furry conventions for three years, but it’s massively affected me and my work.

I want to end this talk by reflecting on some things I’m working on for the future. The first is a series I’m just beginning called the “Dream Home” series. Starting with this HUGE painting of a fictional “analog synth room” in my partner and I’s fictional dream home. Much of painting is excuses, and I love making excuses for myself. The Dream Home is a blatant excuse to fantasize. A room full of analog synths, cats, and my partner up here making cookies in the corner. It’s a way to gesture at a clearly fictional good life filled with love, pleasure, and unbotheredness. Alongside this, I’m making a series of small paintings right now all on burlap. They are all close up shots of Bruce's face frozen in moments that appear somewhere between orgasm and death rattle. Sort of inversely from the Dream Home, these paintings exist because our community is under attack. I’m trying to make sense of how to properly resist the fascism that's coming quickly down upon us. And the thing I keep coming back to is simply to be more of a faggot than I was yesterday. The ground is rapidly shifting under our feet as a community, and I’ve found it more important than ever to engage with sexuality in this context. It’s important that play and sexuality be a code I enforce in my work. I think it’s easy to forget when you’re surrounded by furries how genuinely subversive the work we are doing is. Sexuality will never be divorced from furry. It will never not be a theme in my work. Being an artist that is visibly queer, visibly a furry, means that you have to accept that some people are gonna talk behind your back about how you probably fuck in that dog suit. And guess what. I DO! When I paint Bruce I paint him as a creature uninhibited by the repressions of this fascism. Bruce looks like a furry. He looks like a faggot. He’s made of faggy furry stuff. When you’re in the con space like I am now, you have to be a faggot. It’s un-repressable. I think that’s what my work is about.