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THE LOUISVILL
WWW.LOUISVILLECARDINAL.COM u ott sutlers second oss
ot season against uconn
Surviving finals without
hindering your health
Caitlyn Crenshaw and Michelle Eigenheer
EDITORS
A s the end of the semester comes and
.!'\.finals come with it, good health may
be hard to maintain for students as they ex­ercise
their minds instead of their muscles.
It may be easy for students to push physi­cal
health aside, but as stress levels soar, it's
important that students take care of their
bodies.
"Before you know it, students on cam­pus
will be camping out in the library and
studying ferociously to finish the semester ·
with success," said Katrina Neubauer, a
graduate assistant at the Office of Health
Promotion on campus.
IIUGE FLOORPLANS!
- November 27, 20 12 Vol. 87, Issue 14
CARDINAL
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Mark Barone paints
the canine condition
Simon Isham
ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR
Painting 5,500 portraits in two years. That is the undertaking that
local artist M;~Jk Barone has committed to. These portraits are
unusual, though, in that they <lfe not depictions of or commissioned
by people; -rather, they are Barone's own memorials to dogs that have
been killed in animal shelters because they could not find homes .
. Barone and his wife Marina Dervan are the co-founders of An Act ·
of Dog, a charity that speaks for those who ::annot speak for them­selves;
the goal of the project is to raise 20 million dollars for animal
shelters that do not euthanize. Co-founders Marina Dervan and Mark
Barone are currently searching for a city to be the permanent home
for the An Act of Dog museum, where all 5,500' portraits will be dis-
- played. Louisville is in the running to be that city.
"I always wanted to make sure that this was a purpose-driven proj­ect
and not ,a purse-driven project," said Dervan. As a former nu­tritionist
and self-styled "Honesty Coach," Dervan's media-relations
duties as cofounder of An Act of Dog is a 180 degree reversal from her
previous job experience. ·
An Act of Dog has proven to be a 180 for Barone, too, who previ­ously
painted about the human condition instead of the canin,e one.
Barone received his Bachelors .of Science in Design from the Univer­sity
of Minnesota and his Masters of Fine ~ts f,rom the University of
Southern Indiana, after which he began to paint his own work. It was
at about this time that the first dog found its way into one of Barone's
paintings, but dogs were never the focus. Insteacl, he viewed them as
symbols of loyalty in the background.
Dogs migrated to the foreground in late 2010. After the death of
a 21-year-old canine companion and a move from St. Louis, Mo. to
Santa Fe, N.M;., Dervan and Barone began visiting dog parks in an
atte~pt to heal. Even though Barone did not think that he was not
ready for another dog, Dervan did, and began to search shelter sites
for adoytables. This was how the couple first learned about what goes
on in kill shelters.
''I'd come home after work, tired, and Marina would be sitting
there at the kitchen table, crying about the vjdeos she saw that day. So
finally we started talking about it and what we could do. The next day
I told her to find me ~he .number of how many dogs are killed in the
United States eac:;h day," said Baroil.e. ·
lh~ number Dervan came back with was 5;500- which she says
is lowballing the figure_. According to PETA, the Humane Society of
· the United States, the ASPCA and countless other animal advocacy
groups, between three and ~our million animals ¥e euthanized in the
United States each year, of which Dervan said two million are dogs.
_ This roughly equates to 5,500 dogs per day. Cats have it even worse
- Dervan estimates that the death rate of cats in shelters is nearly
double that of dogs. .
Through their An Act of Dog project, Dervan and Barone hope
to bring attention to all shelter animals, n?t just dogs. Barone chose
to paint dogs . because he believes they are symbolic of all domestic
animals, and because including cats wo~d have taken a chunk of time
that Barone asserts these animals just don't have. It was this feeling
of urgency that caused Dervan and Barone to cash in three IRAs,
their entire retirement savings, to launch An Act of Dog out of their
kitchen in Santa Fe.
AN ACT OF DOG, PAGE 12
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