Studio Tour, Sept 14

I am excited to offer my studio for an end of the summer art tour.

The day should be perfect, sunny and warm but not too hot. New pieces wait your viewing including a 6 foot long crow theme piece, still unframed. You can purchase original art andsmall and larger prints and cards. The feathers I work with will show their stuff, different kinds that you have probably never seen. See where it is that I cut and arrange feathers into shadowbox designs.

The drive is well marked with half circle window facing the main road, Ayer Street, and a green-roofed barn in back. Bear right on the gravel drive and you will be directed by signs to parking.

The salmon are running so fish are getting smoked and will be on hand to munch on along with wine, juice, and cheese.

Guide to legal and illegal feathers in the USA

Gyr Falcon flight feathers

I pay special attention to the legal requirements of possessing feathers since I sell feather art. Many people tell me about their small feather collections so I thought I’d share a rough guide to what feathers you can have in the USA.

I can have:

1. Feathers from most birds that are not native to North America. European Starlings, House Sparrows, Eurasian Collared Doves, and Ring-neck Pheasants are not native to North America. Also, think feathers of peacocks, many parrots, most of the 55 species of pheasants, and small songbirds like zebra finches that are kept in cages. The biggest exceptions to this are the restrictions on having feathers of most birds that live outside North America that are critically endangered1,3.

2. Feathers from most wild duck and geese you can’t sell, except for mallards. You can sell other kinds of duck feathers only if it is for fly tying for fishing.

3. Upland birds that people hunt—like turkey, grouse, and pheasant. Each state can have more restrictive laws, like in Washington State the Sharp-tailed Grouse is threatened so you can’t have those feathers unless you show it came from another state where hunting is permitted.

I can’t have:

1. Feathers from almost all other birds in my country—not eagles of course, but also not seagull feathers, songbird feathers, or even crow feathers (unless you have a permit to kill crows, but you still can't sell them).2

2. Feathers from many birds from other countries that are critically endangered3.

Though all birds naturally shed their feathers about once a year, you’re not legally supposed to have most of them. A law called the (U.S.) North American Migratory Bird Act was made a long time ago when people were killing too many birds to use for fashionable hats. It’s a broad-brush law intended to protect birds.  It doesn’t recognize the difference between plucked feathers, shed feathers, or bird skins; you can’t have any of it. If a feather was pulled from a dead bird that you found at the side of the road or the beach, how does someone know that the bird wasn’t killed on purpose just for the feathers? It can sometimes seem silly but it is a matter of reasonable enforcement, like speeding law enforcement on the highway.

I try to be familiar with the laws but the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is the place to go to for the final word in the USA. Here are some links to their sites plus another helpful link:

1 The American Federation of Aviculture's website has a discussion of when you can have feathers from parrots from other countries that are critically endangered in those countries but because they are commonly kept in aviaries in the USA, it is ok to have their feathers in the USA.

2 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the place to go for the final word on the Migratory Bird Act. The law is explained and they have an alphabetically arranged list of protected birds.

3 Here is a link to lists of earth's endangered species; click Cites Appendices. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service  oversees the Convention on Internation Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) within the USA.

Starlings are absolutely beautiful!

Color chart of starling feather colors

Starlings are absolutely beautiful! More than 100 species of starlings share the world with us. The one we know and usually don’t like in North America is originally European, its namesake.  In Australia and other places another starling, the common myna is not native and not well liked.

But in Europe, Asia, and especially Africa, lots of often gaudy beautifully metallic species roam around and get respect with names like Splendid Starling and Superb Starling.

A PhD candidate at the University of Akron, Rafael Maia is doing some research on the metallic coloring of starling  feathers. He measured their reflectance and structure under a scanning electron microscope. He is investigating how these bird’s metallic colors change and at least in some birds seem to be getting more complex (more beautiful) in over time as they evolve in response to sexual selection. I am borrowing some of his research feathers to photograph and hope to soon have a large and colorful composite photo of all the starling feathers. He plotted the colors of the starling feathers on this color chart, the white dots being the non-metallic ones.

How I get my feathers

Impeyan Pheasant feathers

Where I live, I can’t legally have most North American bird feathers, so most of my feathers are from aviaries.  Since birds shed their feathers about once a year, my favorite way to get feathers are from these sheds. It is like a gift and it is nice to know that the bird is still alive and hopefully well. I even raise a couple of Impeyan Pheasants, the National Bird of Nepal. I collect and use their feathers and get to know what the birds are like even though they are caged, not at 13,000 feet high in the Himalayas. Since my birds are molting now, I picked up their feathers this morning and took this picture this article. The male is fuzzy in the background.  I pick up every shiny feather he sheds.

One time I received a large bag of tiny parakeet feathers from a woman.  Her mother was 75 years old, she told me, when she got a parakeet to keep her company after her husband died. Her mother picked up every single feather from her bird for 22 years.

Most people who send me feathers don’t have time to pick up every tiny one. So most of the molted feathers I use in my shadowboxes are fairly large.  Some are given to me and the rarer ones I purchase or trade for. I have long established relations with several bird owners, zoos, and breeders as well.

Sadly, birds die from disease, predators, accidents, and old age. Parrots that die of old age can be older than me—they live for a long time. Their owners sometimes would rather see the feathers be of use in art rather than be buried with the bird. So I use feathers from these birds too, especially the tinier feathers. Several owners have commissioned me to memorialize their deceased bird in a piece of art.

A feather Column at a Wedding

Wedding feather installation column

I put feathers in shadowboxes, nice and contained. The nature of a feather seems to want out, to float free. I love to see how feathers glide, swirl, float, spin, and wobble when I drop them from balconies to see how they fall. Slowly gravity pulls them down but the resistance of the air keeps them afloat for a while. Someday a video study of falling feathers is in order.

This is looking up at a simple hanging display for a wedding above the heads of the couple getting married. I wanted to capture the sense of falling floating feathers.

YouTube Video of Installation

Swans anyone?

Swan Feather shadowbox, white feathers on white background

Some mute swan feathers that have been gathering dust the past year are finally getting put to artistic use.  I love the way their body feathers (the ones I used for the background in this piece) do a 180 degree curve. This really helps the bird to puff up and trap air. All swan feather vanes (the flat part of a feather) are so thin you can look right through them to see the shapes of what’s behind the feathers.  Swans are big tough birds and they need tough durable feathers to keep warm, water repellent, and migrate. Their feathers do seem to wear out faster than some other birds. Besides being thin, white is the least durable of feather color. That’s because the proteins that cause darker coloration also add strength to a feather. It’s curious why these feathers are built so seemingly thin and delicate compared to other feathers. I am waiting to hear from several biologists who I have asked why this is so with swans. I’ll report back if I hear anything definitive.

Feather Column

Instead of getting placed in shadowboxes, goose body feathers find themselves in a column, hanging still in the air but free to move about with any air motion. This is a new direction this is my first small piece. The first big installation of this idea is planned for an open 3-floor state building—the Washington Department of Ecology’s 40 foot high entryway. I envision a conical spiral.  The installation date has not been set, perhaps as soon as August. There’s a lot of logistics to figure out. I’ll post pictures when it is completed and, since the building is public, anyone may come to see it during working hours if you happen to be in the area.

Freezing Motion

Feather shadowbox (detail), macaw feather

This is a tribute to very early photography when motion was stopped for the first time.  People learned all sorts of things by freezing movement—like how animals run and birds fly. The series of images of a songbird caught in flight were the type of thing that later were put together in pictures shown quickly one after another to give the appearance of movement—the first motion picture.  This is a close-up, using a Macaw feather, I cut the feathers to mirror a set of flying songbird images from photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1870s.

What's the use of beauty anyway?

Beauty on the Move

Not only does seeing beautiful things make us feel alive, in a very real way, beauty keeps us alive. For one thing, if we weren’t attracted to children, we’d have less of a desire to protect them. And it’s harsh, but lots of studies show that beautiful children do get more attention and generally better treatment and breaks than less good looking children. Same with adults. And beautiful people attract more mates which both gives more descendants and over time, selects for the more beautiful. It is the same with birds—only the males are the ones that advertise their beauty in more colorful and fantastical ways. Half-way through reading Survival of the Prettiest, by Nancy Etcoff, this design came to mind. I named it Beauty on the Move.

Dragon Feathers

Birds are my standard themes for feathers. So I felt like I was headed off this theme with this one. But honestly, it came about through writing a poem about feathers for a children’s book:

Dragon Feathers

Some dinosaurs grew small plumes

To keep them warm from chilly doom

If dinosaurs had a few

Why then couldn’t dragons too?

But dragon fire would burn them off

Unless the quills were really tough

Scales is what a dragon’s got

‘cause with plumes they’d be too hot

Kim's Wild Turkeys

Wild turkey feather

Comparing a farm turkey to a wild one is sort of like comparing a deer to a cow. The wild turkey is wary and, well, wild. What captured my attention was what they do at dawn. Where I live and my sister Kim lives, the turkeys fly up into the trees where they roost at night. They blend in, you don't know they're there. Then, just as dawn makes them barely visible as large shapes high in the trees, they start flying down to the ground where they pretty much stay all day.  I’ve spent some time with the only other species of Turkey: the Ocellated Turkey in Yucatan where they have the same behavior.

More on Making Meaning

When I use a feather by itself, divorced from the bird, the feather can be a reminder of the bird that wore it. Art does the same thing—it can describe something, say a bird. But the art is not the bird—it’s an abstraction. Civilization seems to be a process of increasing abstraction, breaking things down into their component parts and reassembling them to suit our needs. Like writing for instance, breaking down sounds into pictures, then syllables, then just individual sounds or letters. And then reassembling them to make meaning and communicate. So then we see the world in the way we describe it—by forming these letters into words and into full thoughts. Feathers though are real in themselves and only one step away from the real bird. So I hope that my work with feathers can be more of a direct connection with the world, a little different and refreshing angle from which to observe the realm.

Making Meaning

Sharp-tailed grousefeathers

Feathers are perfect by themselves so why make art with them? I do it to add meaning: to direct the viewer to ideas they can relate to. Giving meaning abstracts from the thing viewed.  The meaning is not the actual object seen. It involves assumptions which can be wrong. Here’s an example: These sharp-tailed grouse feathers are not grown by the bird to be images of big-breasted love demons, nor deer prints, nor heart-lipped faces. They just add to the bird’s camouflage helping it hide.  I like to remember that the viewer’s mind gives meaning, not the thing viewed. The things themselves are just innocent participants of the mind’s workings. Whether it is the color of someone’s skin, the way people dress, or how we see a feather, seeking meaning helps make sense of the world. It is a very human quality.

Bird Song

Most of the time winter wrens scurry around under ferns and logs deep in the woods. And they give  a tiny, short and abrupt, slightly harsh peep every once in a while if they are upset.  Which they usually are when I am trudging around where they live. But in their springtime, which seems to be about now in late winter, they get up in the tops of the forest trees and sing their hearts out. Long, happy, wonderfully melodious chirps that go on and on.  If their goal in doing this is to establish territory, they have a very different perspective of their songs that I do. So I finished this piece today with the feather-songs drifting down to the ground where I would be.

How Does this Feather Hold Together?

African grey parrot

First, a little background: Each feather is made of a shaft and a bunch of barbs that come off the shaft. Like tree branches. Each branch, or barb has more branches coming off of it. On a feather these smaller branches are called barbules. Each barbule has a grabby claw hook which grasps others. That’s what keeps a feather together and flat. Without them, birds couldn't fly. It’s like Velcro. And they can come apart and zip back together again. So that’s how I cut this African Grey Parrot tail feather without it falling apart: by relying on the barbules to hold the barbs together. This cut shape isn't very strong though. That’s because the connection of some of the barbs to the shaft were severed.  So if the Velcro-like barbule claws come apart, the shape just falls apart. On my shadowbox work, I spend a long time on each feather placing backing material in certain places to make them sturdy. This feather is not backed.

Feathers patterns and color

Color Feather Alphabet ABC

This feather alphabet is a failure. After making a very successful feather alphabet poster from the brown, black and white patterns found in a single bird’s feathers, I said to myself, "a color feather alphabet would be even better." Looking at all sorts of feathers from around the world I did not find nearly enough to make all the letters of the English alphabet. Now that I figured out why I failed, it seems pretty obvious:

Birds use patterns to break up their body outline, to camouflage themselves, to hide. Colors advertise. Colored feathers don’t need patterns.

More on Crows

More than ever, every time I see a crow these past few weeks, I stop and watch. That is because I am still reading Tony Angel's Gift of the Crows. The book has many stories but what sticks in my mind is their brain size. Our bodies are 2% brain. An animal we think of as intelligent is a sperm whale with its huge head, it has a brain size of only 0.0 something percent of body weight.  Brain size for a crow, depending on the species is up  to 3% of total body weight! They can count up to six, they make tools, they are extremely social.  Crows can recognize your face. Something about all this is tremendously compelling and at the same time slightly mysterious, edging toward creepy for some. Two new completed pieces and designs, both with crow themes, uploaded today onto my gallery webpage: Pro Crow Creation and Passing By.

What is it About Crows?

Crow feather cutout

Tony Angel describes them:

“Crows are mischievous, playful, social, and passionate. They have brains that are huge for their body size and exhibit an avian kind of eloquence.”

— Gifts of the Crow by Tony Angel and John Marzluff

Crows live among us so we can see a bit of what they do and they can see us. My first three pieces for 2013 will be of crows: small 11 x 14 inch shadowboxes using their feathers.

Here is the beginning of one.

Winter Bird Count

Hummingbird feather

I participated in the Audubon Society’s annual Winter Bird Count. Each participating city has a five- mile radius circle where people divide up and count as many kinds of birds as they can. Being almost the darkest day of the year, at least in the northern  hemisphere, it was cold, windy, and rainy. I thought the birds would, like me, want to get to a warm cozy place. But then I looked closely and saw that their feathers were sheltering them. The curved body feathers were fluffed up. They were shedding the rain, and keeping the wind out. So elegant and cozy. When I went home, I took off my cumbersome and relatively ineffective clothes—my outdoor feathers. I sat under the roof inside my house by a warm fire—my indoor feathers.

the shining, elusive element which is life itself...

“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”

— Willa Cather, from Song of the Lark (1915).

This was read to us this September by Robert Bateman after the Birds in Art museum show in Wisconsin.

“...the shining, elusive element which is life itself...”

Cather says it best.  It is often what I want to capture in my work.