Looking at Audubon

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled nothingness (in which you wait until Sunday morning for the next post while I eat bonbons on the couch) for a full-on Zick Alert. Perhaps you'll recall last September when I went to visit the New-York Historical Society to view some original watercolors by John James Audubon. I did a bunch of posts (here's one on the wood ducks, and a cool one on the red-tailed hawks) on the marvels revealed there, and expounded on what Audubon's art has meant to me.

 Dale Zickefoose, 58, and a 12-year-old Zick looking at a sheaf of Audubon prints he got for me, ca. 1970. 

Photo by Dan Kemp.

This post's to let you know that there's a 6-minute video expertly produced by Richard Hendrick for WNET-13, which shows curator Roberta Olson hauling out Audubon's watercolor paintings for an astonished and delighted Zick. I'm beside myself to see our segment used as the lead for this wonderful series, in which important and iconic American paintings are explored in depth by experts in the field. Click here for the video.

Audubon's amazing immature red-shouldered hawk, hitting a covey of bobwhite. Yikes! Hope you enjoy the video!

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.

Death Mask Interlude

 From the videotaped interview, it was on to the New-York Historical Society, repository of so many amazing and fascinating objects and works of art that it made me gasp, just walking through a back hallway. Familiar paintings—a Childe Hassam streetscape of NYC—just hanging there, not behind glass or anything…ga-aaw-lee! Great big cases of heads! Oh!

I stopped, riveted as I always am by death masks. Far left, Houdon’s idealized sculpture of a handsome George Washington. Next, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s death mask. Agggh! It was like having him right there in front of me, with his crooked nose and scraggly beard and weary eyes. Well, I’m assuming it’s a death mask, since it was done the year he died, and he doesn’t look particularly alert. 

Sherman served as General under Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, and was notorious for his "scorched earth" approach to conquering Confederate strongholds.

Two over from that, the death mask of Seminole leader Osceola who, but for his high cheekbones, didn’t look much like a Native American to me. (His is the death mask on the left in the photo below). So I did a little reading. Osceola, who claimed to be a full-blooded Muscogee, was born Billy Powell in Alabama to a mixed Muscogee and Scottish mother and an English trader. Nevertheless, he rose in the Seminole ranks, leading a small band of warriors during the Second Seminole War when the US Army tried to kick the Seminoles off their lands. He was captured by being tricked into thinking he was arriving for treaty negotiations, and died of malaria shortly thereafter. So even though he had scant Native American blood, Osceola still got the dubious benefit of being treated like one.

And next to that, to the right of Osceola, the extremely creepy death mask of a dentureless Aaron Burr, vice president with Thomas Jefferson, war hero, brilliant lawyer; killer in a duel of his arch-rival Alexander Hamilton. Burr wanted to establish his own duchy in northern Mexico, the “Burr Conspiracy,” which was funded in part by Harman Blennerhassett, an expat Irish aristocrat who lived on an island in the Ohio River now named for him. My favorite Burr quote: "In the past even I was afraid of my own greatness, therefore I could not stand in front of mirrors." (Oh, yeah, me too, only I don't like mirrors because they make me look fat.)

Poor Burr had been immobilized by a stroke for two years before this mask was made. What a life he led! And somehow it is all written on that weary face.

I peeked around a corner and saw the sculptor’s maquette for Lincoln’s head in the Lincoln Memorial. Did not have my camera. The head alone was taller than me. My jaw simply dropped. They have a little of everything at the New-York Historical Society.  A lot of everything. Just turn me loose there for a month. I could have so much fun! Oh, there’s Napoleon’s writing desk. Of course. 

I felt like a three-year-old in a candy store. But there were Audubons awaiting!