Some years ago I noticed a blue jay’s nest on the metal roof of our house in town. The nest was crafted of sticks and twigs, but bedecked throughout with bits of white—only white—trash: a plastic fork, the rim of a Styrofoam cup, a scrap of plastic signage. To my eye, the jay’s trash selections seemed intentional; this nest builder thought white accents added a bit of flair. I snapped a photo, which I long ago misplaced, but the nest remains vivid in my memory.
On a table in my living room sits a copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, a work now almost two centuries old. Once lauded as an environmentalist, Audubon has recently come under scrutiny as a plagiarist, fabulist, immoderate hunter, slave holder, and racist. Despite this, I still find his images captivating: the birds in preternatural stances in which the painter has deliberately posed his dead models.
Audubon arranged the slaughtered birds to suit his aesthetic and dramatic sensibility, the artist’s eye staring out from each avian visage. I made a pilgrimage to the Field Museum in Chicago to see one of the folios for myself. It is surprisingly enormous. The snaking necks of herons and egrets are forced into the frame of the page, as if the paper and paint could barely contain this bursting nature. As a painter I have found myself in the same quandary, painting too far to the edge, never having enough room for all this wildness.
Which is, in the end, the real quandary. Since I first went birdwatching with my grandmother over a half century ago America has lost close to three billion birds. Eight of Audubon’s birds are now extinct, although other species, like the mute swan and starling, have since taken up residence here. Cats, light pollution, window strikes, factory farming, drought, wildfires, and battering storms have all taken a toll on avian populations, and of course we are there at the root of it all.
Still birds persist alongside us, despite us, and occasionally because of us. In Audubon’s work many of the birds display an intricate beauty, but it is their intelligence he captures that truly compels the viewer and kindles this work. My paintings continue a conversation that Audubon did not begin (he too copied from others) but partook in, a conversation that appreciates avian ingenuity, adaptability, curiosity, intelligence and wit.