Art&Nature

Hard to believe, but it’s our 12^th Birds Make the Art post. One of our highlighted artists makes realistic-looking paper bird models. Another cuts intricate bird designs. The third creates beautiful paintings.

Seeing birds around New York’s City Madison Square Park isn’t a rare occurrence. What is strange is to spot a five-ton raven. Walk by the park between now and April 21st, however, and that’s precisely what you’ll see.

Great egret by John James Audubon, 1821. Photo by New-York Historical Society/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

A new exhibit offers viewers an unprecedented opportunity to experience John James Audubon’s incredible bird paintings, including the famous watercolors featured in The Birds of America as well as some of the artist’s earlier works.

Photo: Michael Berman

Photographer Michael Berman has spent untold hours over the last three decades hiking and surveying the terrain of Gila Wilderness Area, capturing subtle yet intricate details of the southwest New Mexico ecosystem with his large-format camera. Berman, a Guggenheim Fellow, presents a collection of these intriguing photographs in his new book Gila: Radical Visions, The Enduring Silence. 

Talk about getting your hands dirty. Guido Daniele does it—in the most awe-inspiring way—by painting hands to showcase stunning animals. To date, he’s done more than 75, with a third of them birds. Next up, Daniele hopes to create a common loon and an Arctic duck. We spoke with the Italian painter about the artwork, his family, and the message he wants his animals to communicate.

Birds Make the Art has been on hiatus for a couple months, but we’re back now. And today we’ve got some really fascinating stuff. One of our artists is a drawing student. Another creates upcycled vintage jewelry. The third makes stain glass. We just love the endless possibilities when these two worlds come together.

^{Pictorial Encyclopedia of Shakespearean Birds, by Missy Dunaway.}

What, is the jay more precious than the lark,
Because his feathers are more beautiful?

So asks Petruchio in a rhetorical musing from William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (Act IV, Scene III), suggesting that appearance isn’t everything (“’tis the mind that makes the body rich,” he says). The metaphor is just one of many references the Bard makes to birds in his repertoire.

Artwork: Mark Hobson

Seabirds befouled with black ooze are potent symbols of the havoc oil spills can wreak on marine and coastal ecosystems, but the ebony plumage of the bird in Mark Hobson’s “Pelagic Cormorants: Diving for Gobies” is entirely natural. Nevertheless, viewed in the context of the Art for an Oil-free Coast exhibit now touring British Columbia, the painting’s message is unequivocal: wildlife and petroleum products don’t mix.

In each issue of Audubon, the editors review a mix of narrative nonfiction titles, as well as art books and children’s books about nature. For ease, we’ve compiled the dozens of fantastic works we reviewed in 2012 in one place, and we’ve added a few additional books that we covered exclusively online.

^{White-throated sparrow, by John Muir Laws.}

You love birds. You fancy yourself somewhat artistic. And you really want to get into avian sketching, yet the whole process seems so hard. A grab-and-go field sketching kit will help you turn drawing into a habit.