Passenger Pigeon Print!

As an artist who enjoys bringing extinct species to life, I have a fossil bone to pick. What I want to know is this. Why do most reconstructions of extinct creatures wind up looking like this? From a recent USA Today article about what must've been a bitchin' toothed albatross:

I should qualify that question. I want to know why these paleontologists don't get ahold of someone who knows how to draw lively images of related living species. (Why don't they call me??)  I actually know why most reconstructions wind up looking spare and unimaginative, sterile and tentative. It's because many artists simply clutch when asked to draw something out of their imaginations, something they can't copy from a photo. I would wager a bet that this person had never drawn an albatross. Maybe they don't even know how to draw birds. In my opinion, freely and rashly given, there's nothing right about this drawing, from the bulbous, football-shaped body to the feet to the wing structure to the structure, insertion and feel of the head, neck and bill. The expression is blank. Its eye is dead. There's nothing believable going on here, artistically or biologically. I would have LOVED to have a chance to draw this bird. 

Unfortunately, you see the same sterile renderings and blank, boring backgrounds in reconstructions of many extinct taxa: mammals, dinosaurs. It's like they're all drawn by the same person. And I think it's because the artists are clutching. They're not relying on living creatures as their source of reference, aren't bothering to figure out what their habitat might have looked like, so they come up with these tentative, lifeless images.

Here's what you do when you're drawing an extinct bird. You go off what you know of its nearest living relatives. Granted, painting a passenger pigeon is a LOT easier than painting a Teratornis, because there exist some beautiful  photos of living passenger pigeons, and lots of mounted specimens.

Still and all, I wanted to create a scene that hadn't been painted before: a family with a half-grown nestling. I'd show the male's gorgeous coloration off to best advantage, in a classic three-quarters pose, but I'd paint Mom and baby in poses that I know mourning doves assume, that I've drawn many times from living birds. I'd give them dancing sunlit beech leaves as a backdrop, put some color and pizzaz in the picture.

Three of Billions: Passenger Pigeons at the Nest

by Julie Zickefoose
Image size: 9" x 12"
Fits standard 14" x 18" frame when matted.

 Though I'd drawn them, I'd never painted passenger pigeons until Editor/Co-Publisher Bill 

Thompson III asked me to do a Bird Watcher's Digest cover to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passenger pigeon's extinction, September 1, 2014. It's a story that's been told again and again. Martha, the last remaining passenger pigeon, passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo that day. My dad was two years old. It was a sad, sad day for biodiversity; a sad period, during which man did everything in his power to exterminate a magnificent torpedo of a bird, a bird that operated as a many-celled organism in vast migratory flocks that blotted out the sun. 

 In reading essays and treatises on the passenger pigeon, written in observance of the 100^th anniversary of its extirpation, I’m struck by the fact that almost all seem to dwell on the mechanism, the process of its extinction. Perhaps that’s because that’s all we really know of this singular bird. It’s as if we were collectively asleep until it hit us that the thundering flocks were suddenly no more. I wanted to paint a tribute to the passenger pigeon as it lived, not as it died. This is a portrait of its domestic life, the deep investment of a pair in their single squab. I have never seen a painting that depicts a nestling, and I wanted to do that, to draw on what I know of mourning doves to imbue this image with life and feeling. I've raised a few mourning doves, watched them with their parents at the nest, and I wanted to convey the affectionate nature of pigeons in the painting.

Could there have been two squabs in that nest, the story might have ended differently. But the passenger pigeon, like its single child, was one of a kind, with an ancient reproductive strategy. Swamping any potential predators with simultaneous colonial nesting worked fine for raccoons and hawks. But the master predator, ready and able to ship traincars full of pigeons to waiting markets, was nothing the passenger pigeon had faced in its evolutionary history. All these thoughts ran through my head as I mixed the gorgeous peach and slate colors of their feathers, and wished them back to life, if only on a sheet of watercolor paper.

Three of Billions: Passenger Pigeons at the Nest is a digital proof made right here in Marietta, Ohio, at Richardson Printing, using state-of-the-art equipment with UV inks on Strathmore Linen archival paper. I got to breathe over Printer Bob's shoulder as he tweaked the color, and though Richardson Printing knows I'm notoriously fussy about color, I'm really happy with the result. Such one-off digital proofs as Three of Billions are often referred to as “giclees,” which is a fancy French word for a print that’s made on demand. This saves a lot of money and a lot of trees. Instead of firing up a huge press and running an obligatory 3-500 prints, as was formerly done with my Bird Watcher’s Digest cover images, I can now have the image printed only as I receive orders.

Three of Billions is available as an unmatted giclee print directly from Julie Zickefoose.
 Image size is 9" x 12", and it mats up to 14" x 18" (standard sized frame).

 $50 includes shipping; you may send a personal check made payable to

Julie Zickefoose
 Indigo Hill Arts
 Whipple, OH 45788

 To order and pay by credit card, you may use the DONATE button on the right sidebar of this blog homepage. Be sure to include your address! Don't worry--it's not really a donation. You'll get a gorgeous giclee print, signed by the artist. That would be me!

As always, thank you for your support. I'm excited about the potential of giclee prints, and I'm already thinking of other popular paintings of mine that would lend themselves to such a treatment. It's all a big experiment, an adventure, trying to send two kids to college on a freelance artist's income. Every little bit helps.

Yes. This is the Art Gallery.

Always wanted an original Zickefoose watercolor? Read on.

Living out as far as we do, we don't get many knocks on the front door that we aren't already expecting. A scorching early August day. I'm still in my running clothes, still wearing the sweatband and the sweat, too. The doorbell rings. I peek through the beveled glass to see a woman in a bright blue blouse standing on the stoop. I reflexively open the door, instantly wishing I'd thought to throw a shirt over the sports bra. Oh well. Nothing she hasn't seen before, I expect. (Why don't I keep a shirt by the door? Duh!)

"Is this the art gallery?" She peered past me to the shoes in the foyer; the clutter of everyday life.

"Uhhhhm....well, my stuff is all over the walls, so I guess you could....umm, lemme get a shirt on..." My kids would have given the moment a 9.5 on the Awkward-o-Meter.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I was just at Bird Watcher's Digest's office in Marietta, and I looked up your business listing on my phone and it gave me a map to your house. I thought it must be set up as a gallery. And this is your home. I'm so sorry!! You're Julie Zickefoose, right?"

"Yes! that's me. Please come inside. Don't feel bad. Maybe I can sign your book for you."

 I'd noted that she had a copy of The Bluebird Effect in her hands. I got her a glass of cold water and it wasn't long before we were laughing about the misunderstanding. I think I'd have abandoned the assumption that I'd find a retail art gallery after the first couple miles of winding country road and distinct paucity of retail businesses (Yes! We're right next to the Starbuck's and across from Curves! Or...turn right at the hayfield where the old Morgenstern place got torn down...) The whole episode was instructive. First, I hadn't realized that my business was listed online with full contact information and a Google map. I never did that! So who did?? Eeek. Ack. This Information Age, it can be scarily intrusive (says the blogger who's been telling you everything for almost seven years...)

She asked to see some limited edition prints and, being a nice person, bought a couple, as well a copy of Letters from Eden. I took her up to the tower and we stood and looked out at the hills and the gardens down below. I was glad she came, and I think she was too.

The whole thing got me thinking. My house is an art gallery, really, if you don't count the shoes in the foyer and the dishes in the sink or the usual attire of the proprietor (No stilettos or little black Chanel dresses to my name). And there are stacks of paintings that won't fit on the walls, stored neatly in two huge flat files that dominate the studio floor space. Downstairs, boxes of framed paintings. Upstairs in a storage room, carrels of paintings. What am I saving them for? I don't know. But they're not doing us any good sitting around in boxes.

I was asked to be Executrix for the estate of Louis and Lois Darling in 1991-2. Both amazing natural history artists, their house looked something like my house: paintings on every possible wall, and stacks of 'em in flat files and boxes. Lois asked me to donate the lot to the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Collection of Children's Literature, and I did. As I sorted and stacked, I shook my head at how sad it all was, that nobody got to see this incredible work but me, and here I am wrapping and boxing it up to ship off to be stored somewhere else. And with that experience behind me, I find myself wondering if all this art I've got here might be better appreciated in the homes of people who know me and like my stuff.

I've not had much experience with gallery transactions, and what I've had I didn't much like. There's something about a gallery marking things up then taking 50% of the price just for hanging it that rubs me the wrong way. Having to call to see if they've sold your paintings, finding out they sold months earlier, then having to ask for your check again and again...nuhhhhh.  Even if people wanted to pay that much for bird paintings, which by all accounts they don't.

So. The tower is peeling; the boards are rotting. Windows and roof vents are leaking into my art storage room. Ack. That's not where you want leaks. We'd hoped to make some repairs on our slowly deliquescing house, had hoped to hire someone to paint it; even bought all the paint last fall. And then in January 2012 we made an album (The Rain Crows' "Looks Like Rain")  and making it the absolute best it could be, we cleaned ourselves completely out and have yet to recover from that. We don't regret making the CD for a moment, but we have yet to have anything to show for it other than a few people saying, "Hey! Great stuff!"  I don't kid myself that selling a few bird paintings can paint the tower for us, but it might help make the wait between book payments go a little easier, might make that next stack of bills, that next mortgage payment a little less frightening.

What I thought I'd try is posting a photo of a painting I'd like to offer, with a minimum suggested bid.  Giving it a week, letting people bid on it, then closing the bidding and sending the painting off to the highest bidder. It might work. It might not.**see update, below. I guess if it doesn't work, the worst that can happen is that it's embarrassing for me.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And if you don't try something new, nothing ever changes. Make like Nike and just do it. I sound intrepid, but I'm pumping myself up because I'm tired of pondering, wondering if being my own sales rep for original art could work. I'm ready to do it.

So here's the first piece. So many people have expressed their admiration for the book's cover, and asked if I have prints of it, that I thought I'd offer an original watercolor that looks just like it. It's a study for the cover of my book, The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds.  11" x 13", transparent watercolor on Winsor-Newton paper.  Minimum bid: $550.   Bidding closes next Sunday, September 9, 2012.

You can leave a comment with a bid in the Comments section, or if that seems too public, just email me:
julieATjuliezickefooseDOTcom. I'll let people know where the bidding's going in the comments section and here on this post, but will absolutely respect your privacy if you'd prefer to bid via email.

OK. Deep breath. Here we go!

11 AM 9/2/12: Minimum bid met.
11 AM 9/9/12: Closed.

Update 9/9/12: I found out in the  meantime via a concerned reader and a wise mentor that there are all kinds of regulations in Ohio regarding auctions, involving applying for a permit, and awesome fines for trying to conduct one without sanction from the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture. Which is not exactly what I need at this point. Fines. So I was relieved that this turned out to be a direct sale instead. And am delighted to send the painting off to the first and only bidder. A win-win, to find that out, to avoid being fined for striking out in a new entrepreneurial direction; to find a home for a painting I love with a person I love, too. In the future I'll offer art for a fixed price. And probably, based on your comments, keep the pieces smaller and more affordable. Thanks for your feedback and encouragement.