birdspot

I am not, let it be said, really an illustrator. I mean, yeah, obviously I kind of am, and my works get designated as illustrations on a regular basis, and it is apparent that I am exploring such things intensively. I hate snide remarks that wantonly designate one thing as exalted fine art and another as mere illustration, and I have little tolerance for narrow points of view. I love blurred boundaries and indistinct territories. I love pieces that give me an interesting path or thought as they struggle through things. Visual art utilizes myriad levels of language, and these languages are interesting – different languages are interesting.

Following this train of thought, I realize I have never really been a fan of John James Audubon. I do like his work: it is intriguing to me for his time and place and thinking, but encountering it as a child, I was left a little cold. I mean, the birds are dead. They look dead, improbable, mannered. This exact quality also makes me like the work, but it is exactly that quality that makes me want to do something else. The temptation to reference such a powerful, ubiquitous language is pretty great, to use that language to make a contemporary judgement on ecology or “nature” more intriguing perhaps than to make a lifelike representation of a bird, a “mere illustration”.

Here I am, making illustrations of dead birds. If contextual ambiguity can be described as a worthy goal, well then, hand me another degree. Field guide illustrators (more to come! more to come!) are involved with the complex conceptual challenges of presenting an easily identifiable “bird” that is really more a composite idea of a bird than an actual bird. Did that make any sense? On another end, people in the fine arts are deeply suspicious of anything that looks like the artist doesn’t get it – doesn’t understand the verity that any representation is a falsity. Did that make any sense? What is clear is that unless I do some serious tweaking to dead bird renderings, chances are that the worlds of galleries and museums will turn a cold, hard shoulder and resolutely ignore them. It’s not a certainty, but artistic fame and glory doing this is pretty unlikely.

This is a path I am presenting here, an off kilter course towards making work that I find deeply satisfying, and a learning process. This year, this blog, this internet presentation, is my project.

On another note, I spent so many hours studying that damn dead Mourning Warbler (top detail image), that on Sunday, while co-leading the Zeiss/Adorama Central Park workshop, a bird zinged past me and I blurted “Oporornis. We should go find that.” It passed me at eye level, through a brushy tangle (a blurry, indistinct, sketchy ID opportunity), and I remember thinking halfsy-pink-bill-good-undertail-coverts-good-right-kind-of-yellow-looks good for Mourning. Tom Stephenson later refound the bird, and there it was, a beautiful, live Mourning Warbler.

On another, another note: I picked these particular skins to draw from because they were strange, and they weirdly reminded me of Audubon: contorted, expressive, definitively dead. The Prothonotary Warbler (middle bird) was sporting a crazy amount of red pigment, and was weird for that reason. The Kentucky Warbler (left bird), caught my eye for its head patterning, as seen from beneath. And then, on the tags for the Mourning Warbler (rightmost bird) in tiny, 100+ year old letters, an inscription, a provenance: “presented by John J. Audubon.” I was drawing from Audubon all along.

Drawing is 15 x 11″, ink and watercolor on paper.

Avocet (European), watercolor on paper

Peering through multiple lenses, filters stacked against shifting realities, I fell upon something a few weeks back. I have been intently studying shorebirds, partially for seasonal, partially for masochistic reasons, and have been buried in photos and mud and books and dead things. In all of this, I was watching obliquely for artistic inspiration. Despite my meanderings, I have a pretty strong sense of purpose in my current lines of inquiry, though let’s not jinx that here and now by going into it.

Picking through photos containing multiple shorebirds, at about the 800th photo, I noticed something. Then I went back and looked at all the photos again. Then I asked around a bit. Then I went to a pile of Sanderling skins and looked at them. Then I did some quick drawings, which humbly present here, to you: the Notch, or more specifically, a batch of bare skin around the gape of a Sanderling that has a very distinctive shape. Then I got lost for a couple of hours in the incredibly beautiful patterns on the back of a worn, molting Sanderling, went somewhere very else in my mind, and did a bunch of loose watercolors that can be only be described as ghostly bird forms….

Back to the notch: I found it in all plumages, though it can be a little smaller in alternate (breeding) plumage. This feature has not made it into most field guides. You don’t need this notch to identify Sanderlings, obviously. One does not need to hypothesize about such things (and perhaps be wrong) in order to make art, at all. I wasn’t looking for this, but my curiosity is piqued. Other shorebirds have varying notches too, but this strikes me as distinctive. Does it hold up? Will you look for me?