Audubon Alive

We're looking at Audubon's original watercolor of wood ducks--surely one of his finest works. As a painter, I'd certainly pull out all the stops for one of America's loveliest birds. I love how the sycamore leaves tilt and turn in space, echoing the wing shapes of the birds. Beneath the courting pair, Audubon has pasted a flying drake, cut out from another piece of paper! This is a classic pose for him—not necessarily one we’d see in life, but quite decorative and showing all the salient plumage features. In Michael Harwood and Mary Durrant’s excellent book, On the Road with John James Audubon, I learned that the common mythology that Audubon “wired” his specimens into lifelike poses is not really true. As a kid, I always envisioned him running wires through the dead birds, bending necks and wings like action figures. I have prepared enough museum specimens to know that this would be a really difficult thing to do. Rather, what he did was to pin the dead bird to a board, impaling it if necessary with sharpened wires, then set the board up before his table so he could paint directly from the specimen. This flying duck shows just how a bird pinned to a board might look. Knowing how he arranged his birds goes a long way toward explaining some of the more artfully outlandish poses that got him in so much trouble with his critics. Next time you look at Audubon’s work, envision the birds pinned to a board, and see if that doesn’t come through in their poses. Not all, to be sure--he had great drawing chops. But this flying wood duck is an excellent example.

I want to speak here briefly about “Audubon prejudice,” a curious affliction that began when his work first hit the viewing public, and persists to this day. The tendency to bash Audubon’s work reached a crescendo in the 1970’s, at the height of the wildlife print craze, when every American den had a bald eagle soaring against the Rockies, every feather and every needle on each fir visible, or a howling wolf with every hair delineated. In those times, detail equaled artistry in the opinion of true wildlife print fanatics. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, “Painter X is absolutely fantastic! Have you seen the DETAIL in his work??” I’ll bite the inside of my cheek and enthusiastically assent. Yep! He’s terrific! All that detail…wow.

A Baltimore oriole by the British painter Basil Ede, showing the every-feather-delineated treatment so popular in the 1970's. If I got a bird into rehab that looked like this, I'd pump him up with biotin and Vitamin E.

I briefly joined the ranks of the detail worshipers, and for a few years I idolized J. Fenwick Lansdowne, Glenn Loates and others whose meticulousness rivaled and, in my current and perhaps more evolved opinion, occasionally overtook their artistry. But I never lost my love for Audubon, and I always hove to him and to his heir Louis Agassiz Fuertes as my north stars for bird painting. Later, the late and sadly missed Robert Verity Clem became a mentor, and he encouraged me to paint what I saw, not what I knew to be there. If a bunch of scapular feathers appeared to be a single mass, paint them that way—we don’t need to see the outlined edge of each feather. Painting a bird that way makes it look sick, out of condition, unnatural. A healthy bird’s feathers blend into one another, smooth as butter. Sure, you know there are a bunch of individual feathers in that mass, but if you can't see them, paint what you see!

While there is detail in Audubon’s work, he also knew what to leave out, and his original watercolors show that. This is just to say that I don’t fully understand why some people continue to denigrate his work. I’ve had people tell me my paintings remind them of Audubon’s, and then backpedal, apologizing, as if they’ve insulted me! Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Maybe it’s the lack of overt feather detail where they want to see it. Maybe it’s the over-the-top, ecstatic poses he sometimes used to liven the compositions. Maybe it’s because they haven’t examined why they feel that way…maybe they think it’s cool to bash Audubon because they’ve heard someone else say it.  Maybe they don’t grasp what a pioneer he was. He was the first person EVER to paint a bird that really looked like the bird.  He ignored, exceeded, blasted right past the stylistic trends of his day--painting shorebirds standing bolt-upright; painting warblers stretched as if on a rack, their bills pointing up--and painted the birds as he saw them in life. I'm not sure I can adequately convey how far ahead of the pack he was. Nobody was painting a wood duck on its nest--they were slapping the bird in profile bolt upright on white paper, or perching them on a little mound of dirt with three sprigs of imaginary grass coming out of it, the bestiary treatment by artists who'd never seen them in real life.  And as I said in my first post, in my opinion he’s still better than 99% of the people painting birds today.

I looked at the carefully camouflaged edge of the cut-out drake. He’d cut out the fine feathers of the crest—he must have had something like a razor blade. I could see where the mandible of the bird had torn off—d’oh! So Audubon painted the rest of it right on the paper he’d pasted it to. And there was his handwriting—a note to Robert Havell. “The Circle around the eye, and the upper Mandible as in the Male above.”

Here’s the male he was referring to. Was the artist lacking the right paints to color that orbital skin? I’m guessing he was. Seeing his handwriting raised the hair on my arms. That, and the pasted image with its torn mandible, somehow made this genius real to me. I hoped he could see me down here on Earth, marveling at the gift he had left for us all. I hope he knows that he’s left a legacy for the ages, undimmed for almost 200 years. And in the care of the New-York Historical Society, where his widow Lucy Bakewell Audubon chose to deposit these works, it will carry forward.

And now, for those of you whose interest in Audubon may have been re-awakened by these posts, I have a present. No, Roberta Olson  and the New-York Historical Society have a present for you. From March 1-May 30, 2013 (tentative dates), every single one of Audubon’s original watercolors—a total of 474 works—will be gathered together at the New-York Historical Society for a public exhibition called Audubon’s Aviary: The Complete Flock.

Not only that, but the N-YHS and Rizzoli is publishing Roberta Olson's new book by the same title, composed of reproductions from the original watercolors, to be released in time for the show. Having spent a giddy morning soaking up Roberta's observations of these paintings she has studied so closely, I already know this is going to be one heck of a book on Audubon.

Mark your calendars! And...See you at the opening! Here end the Audubon posts.


My deepest gratitude to Richard Hendrick, filmmaker, WNET-Thirteen, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The New-York Historical Society and Roberta Olson for allowing me the opportunity of a lifetime.

Carolina Parakeets

When I think of John James Audubon, I think of an itinerant naturalist/painter, roaming from one drawing opportunity to the next, perhaps carrying a big portfolio of works in progress under his arm. I think about the difficulty of curating paintings like this, what with mice and bugs and fire and rain and mildew. All my original work is either framed or lain away in darkness in secure oaken or metal flat files, groaning now with the weight of the paper within.

How can it be that ALL  470 of Audubon's original watercolors (and with gifts to the New-York Historical Society, four more) have survived intact and in more or less pristine condition to this day? At the height of the Civil War, the Society purchased by subscription all of Audubon's original work from his widow, Lucy Bakewell Audubon. And it is to Audubon, to her, and to the N-YHS we owe this incredible legacy, this gift beyond value. They all survived, and they are all in one secure place, carefully curated, each one in its own baker's box on shelves in humidity-controlled conditions.

It defies belief, but there they all are, and I was looking at one of my very favorites, if not my favorite, Audubon painting with a magnifying glass and tears starting in my eyes.

The only parrot native to the United States was a beautiful little doozy, Conuropsis carolinensis. Like almost all parrots, it flocked and chattered and squabbled, searching for fruits and seeds in the bottomland forests and croplands of a settling nation.

Audubon's words:  " The woods are the habitation best fitted for them, and there the richness of their plumage, their beautiful mode of flight, and even their screams, afford welcome intimation that our darkest forests and most sequestered swamps are not destitute of charms. "

 To an orchardist, a rainbow-colored flock of Carolina parakeets descending on a row of peach trees was a most unwelcome sight. Before the days of scare tactics--tapes of distressed birds, played at high volume--before the days of conservation--before it occurred to us that nature may not renew itself inexhaustibly--we shot them.  By 1832, Audubon  noted that they were declining.

"Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen. At that period, they could be procured as far up the tributary waters of the Ohio as the Great Kenhawa, the Scioto, the heads of Miami, the mouth of the Manimee at its junction with Lake Erie, on the Illinois river, and sometimes as far north-east as Lake Ontario, and along the eastern districts as far as the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland. At the present day, very few are to be found higher than Cincinnati, nor is it until you reach the mouth of the Ohio that Parakeets are met with in considerable numbers. I should think that along the Mississippi there is not now half the number that existed fifteen years ago."


We shot them, and the still-living birds would circle and try to attend to fallen flockmates, so we shot those, too, until there were no more Carolina parakeets anywhere. They made splendid decorations for hats; they were taken for pets; they were simply wasted in every way we could waste them. The last free-flying wild flock was spotted by Frank Chapman in 1904. The last wild specimen, collected in Orlando, Florida in 1913. (Before Disney World, there were ivory-billed woodpeckers in Orlando, too. Must've been a heck of a place before the "Magic Kingdom" replaced the real magic kingdom.)

  A pair, Incas and Lady Jane, survived for 32 years in an aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo, the same aviary that had housed Martha, the last passenger pigeon. Lady Jane died in 1917, and Incas followed soon after on February 18, 1918. Another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

 But here they were, as close to alive as anyone could make them, a whole flock of what must have been Audubon's favorite bird, too, judging from the love with which he drew them. The top male had 14 tail feathers instead of the usual 12, so Audubon spread his tail and made notes about it in his journal.

He's got the chaotic psittacine flock dynamic spot-on--bickering, biting, pirating, squabbling, scratching and preening. Parrots are such fun to watch as they constantly relate to one another. The composition flows in a graceful S-curve. Audubon drew his birds directly onto the watercolor paper. I, on the other hand, draw tracing paper dummies, which I Xerox and then cut and tape into endless combinations until I'm satisfied with the composition. Sometimes I'll spend most of a day composing and recomposing a painting, and then come in the next morning and tear it all apart and do it over. when I finally have a composition I like,  I put the taped-together construction on a big lightbox and trace my drawings onto the watercolor paper. I cannot imagine creating a composition like this, of life-sized birds, while drawing each one directly onto the paper. Each one is perfect! It boggles my mind.

In the lower tier, a green-headed juvenile, just trying out its own cocklebur pod, but probably still being fed by its parents. Its wings, loosely held to its body; a psittaciphile can almost see them shaking as it begs from its nearby parent.

The lower right bird, just launching itself right at the viewer in a gorgeous head-on shot that shows the blossom-like orange face to perfection.

 With a strong light aimed for a few moments, we could see the pencil lines Audubon inscribed over the paint, creating the effect of individual feather barbules. So masterful is his handling of the feather structure and the lights and darks, that each feather seems to lift off the paper and glow with iridescence. It's hard to describe until you see it close up, and it's hard to see when your eyes are full of tears. I was afraid I'd drip on them, so I had to step back. Though I've held their skins in my hand, I know that, through Audubon's incredible hand, this original watercolor is the closest I'll ever be to a live Carolina parakeet.

My own feeble attempt at capturing an extinct bird, 2001. I include it most humbly, to illustrate my point that genius is genius, and transcends time and space.  Audubon's birds are alive! and mine are kind of silly by comparison. Like I said, Audubon's the man, forever and always.

 

Thanks to my new friend Charles Alexander for digging out the Audubon quotes.

Audubon's Red-tailed Hawks

 Watching Roberta open the big black art boxes was like Christmas morning for me. I think she enjoyed it as much as I did—to be able to show original watercolors to a watercolorist who is also an Audubon freak must be really fun. Ohhhh, the redtails. Fighting over the gory, gooey dying rabbit. Yesss.

Not something a lot of folks would want hanging on their wall, what with the guts and the pee, but oh, my! What a thrill to see it in the original art. It was huge! The redtails and rabbit are life size. Just incredible.

                 

                                                                 

Audubon rendered fur beautifully. I was fascinated with the discernable buildup of paint on the rabbit’s eye. Even more interesting was the way the white undertail coverts of the redtail were shining right through the rabbit’s face. I’m not sure what’s  going on here, but it appears that Audubon painted the redtail, then painted the rabbit right over it! You can see the lines of tail feathers on the bunny’s lower lip. I suspect that over time an ingredient in the white paint on the hawk's undertail coverts (zinc? lead?) has oxidized, allowing it to shine through the overpainted rabbit.

Commenter Hap in New Hope MN pointed out what looks like the letter A on the rabbit's mandible. What's with that? I doubt that Audubon would have signed his work with an initial in a dying rabbit's mouth. I think, rather, that it is a perhaps misdrawn tooth that has been made more obvious by the oxidizing white paint--the same bugaboo that lets the hawk's tail feather edges show through the rabbit's jaw. I dug up a photo of a cottontail skull from skullsunlimited.com.

Rabbits don't have teeth on the mandible until you get to the grinding molars. It looks to me like Audubon may have been a bit indecisive about just where the lower incisors would go. I think I see them, properly occluding the upper incisors, but they're not fully rendered.  So perhaps that's why he left the "A"  just as a pencil outline. And oxidizing paint threw it into relief. But that's just my guess. Other guesses are welcome. A little code letter for engraver Havell? Who can say?

This is a nasty fight over a big prey item. Beautifully rendered feet and talons, with foreshortening…could the lower bird have pierced the upper bird’s heel pad with its talon? Flowing blood suggests so.

Look at how Audubon merely suggested the fluffy white shank feathers of the redtail with a few pencil lines—shorthand for engraver Robert Havell, who would fill in the blanks as he saw fit. 

JJA has a male, top, and a female beneath, and he’s got the size proportions correct—female buteos are as much as 1/3 larger than males. It’s clear to me Audubon had some gorgeous, freshly killed birds to work from—the beautiful flow and lay of the wing feathers say fresh bird to me. I love the shadow of the male hawk’s right wing on his tail. But see those grayish drops on the central tail feathers? Roberta speculated that it could be tea. There is tea on several Audubon originals. They were given to the colorists who hand-colored the elephant folio plates, and while knocking about in the studio, the originals sometimes got things spilled on them. Yikes. I’d hate to be the painter who spilled tea on that translucently lovely tail.

This is one of Audubon's finest birds, I think, lovingly rendered from a freshly killed specimen. Which lives on, two hundred years later. While it's sad that it had to die, that's a high use for a redtail, to be sure.

Yellow-breasted Chats

Next, New-York Historical Society's Curator of Drawings Roberta Olson pulled out the yellow-breasted chats. Oh, how did she know how I loved that painting? It was exquisite—the depth and delicacy of the nest in particular.  Not to question the master, but I’m not sure he’s got the proportions right—the female chat seems to be buried in her nest. Chats do build a big, bulky nest but she looks quite swallowed up by this construction. Nevertheless…look at the ring of rosies around that exquisite nest. Nests are very difficult to do well. This one, aside from the proportions, is irreproachable.


Here's a photo by my patient friends Richard and Susan Day that shows chats with their nest. It's a big, deep nest, but not perhaps quite as big around or deep as Audubon showed it. 

Photo courtesy of Richard and Susan Day, Daybreak Imagery

Roberta said that this work is one of her favorites, too, for the way that Audubon tells the whole story of courtship and nesting in one painting. Of course male chats would not be displaying right over an occupied nest, but she said she thinks of it more in a comic-strip way, that Audubon is telling the story of the male’s courtship, which culminates in a nest with the male feeding his mate as she incubates their eggs. You’ll see that in another painting, coming up.

Roberta pointed out that the belly-up male chat does not appear in the final print. Audubon got a lot of flak from ornithologists of the day for his exuberant poses, which he got from the living birds, as well as from the birds he wired to his drawing board. Having lived with breeding chats around our yard for 18 years, I can attest that they do fling themselves up into the air when they start their butterfly display flight. How frustrating it must have been for Audubon to have to tone down what he knew to be right and true, in order to satisfy an audience that was both more conservative and less experienced than he.

 I had a lovely ink drawing of an American redstart, flinging itself up into the air after a leafhopper, that was rejected by the ornithologist for whose species account I drew it, because “redstarts never do that.” Oh. How odd that an ornithologist would employ the word “never” when referring to the movements of our most acrobatic and agile warbler. I’ve seen redstarts fling themselves straight up, straight down in a flurry of wings and tail, turning themselves inside out—whatever it takes to catch the insect. But however much the artist grumbles, the client is always right, so I did another drawing.

Original Audubon Watercolors

Our guide at the New-York Historical Society would be curator Roberta Olson, whose enthusiasm for and knowledge of the art of Audubon is unequaled. She's been over every print and painting with a magnifying glass, and in speaking of Audubon, brings him to glorious life.

First to come was a double elephant folio of Audubon prints, carefully opened by the curator to the flamingo page. Now these are not original watercolors, but engravings that were done from Audubon's original watercolors and hand-colored in a limited edition for collectors.  I couldn’t believe how vivid the colors were, how huge the image was. Audubon painted every bird life-size, so putting an American flamingo on even a double elephant folio sized page was a challenge. He folded and crimped the bird, and yet gave it life and motion. The back foot is lifted as if it’s in mid-step. Across the top of the page are some line drawing studies of the bill structure. And behind the bird range some other flamingos. Looking at them, it was clear to me that Audubon did not draw them. Their proportions were badly off, as were their stances--in sharp contrast to the exquisite foreground bird. Perhaps they were added by engraver Robert Havell, who, though he was terrific at what he did, was nobody's  bird artist.    (My mom used to describe certain people, the kind whose elevator doesn't go all the way to the top, as "nobody's brain.")

                                                   

I was curious about why the Picturing America project chose Audubon’s flamingo as its iconic American image. (The filmmaker wasn’t consulted about the selection). Audubon observed flamingos in the Florida Keys in 1832, and was wild to paint them. He badgered his friend Bachman (he of Bachman’s warbler fame) to send him specimens, but didn’t get his wish until 1838. What torture, to hold onto that vision for six years! He had to have the specimen shipped from Cuba, and painted it in London. From the way the primaries fold beneath the secondaries, and the way the wing stands outside the body plumage rather than tucking into it, it appears to me that he was forced to work from a dried skin, but he nevertheless imbued it with life. Compare the way the wings are almost hidden by the ornamental scapular feathers of these living birds, and how you can't see the black primaries, with the stiff, dried-looking wing on Audubon's painting. He'd certainly have gotten that right if he'd been able to see a live flamingo up close.

 Caribbean flamingos, Columbus Zoo, November 2009

 When I think of Audubon, many other images spring to mind—his lively ivory-billed woodpeckers; his Carolina parakeets in cocklebur.  His yellow-breasted chats, his wood ducks. Ah well, They’re all magnificent. The selection process may have been simple: The flamingo, though it barely and accidentally incurs into southernmost Florida every once in a blue moon, is big, impressive, and bright pink.

 Wild flamingos, Celestun, Yucatan, Mexico.

And now, curator Roberta Olson revealed what was in the tantalizing black portfolios on the tables in the viewing room. She pulled out Audubon’s original watercolor for the American flamingo. Innocent of background, the bird stood alone on the off-white paper. Audubon had painted egg white over the salmon- pink (quite a different and truer plumage color than shown in the elephant folio print), and over time that glaze had bubbled up and oxidized into brownish drips and crackles. This is one of the few originals that doesn’t look as nice as the print.

But there were more original watercolors. My heart started to race. Roberta, with flourish and an air of a magician, pulled out the house wrens next. There they were, nesting in their felt hat. Roberta showed me where Audubon had let the watercolors mingle and leave little tidelines with water to create texture on the hat. The wrens’ droppings were doubtless once bright white, but the lead in the white paint had oxidized to bluish gray. I’d always wondered about that.  At this point I was still very shy about pulling out my camera. I was almost afraid to breathe on the paintings. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the watercolor paper (Whatman, still made today) that Audubon painted on; that the heel of his hand had rested on it as he moved the brush.