the thing with feathers

I make paintings of song birds that are eight feet tall. 

 I paint them in meditation, in veneration, seduced by the hope that if I am meticulous enough in capturing every line and curve and shaft and shadow, I can save them from their looming extinction.

Painting them so large is my way of screaming about their loss. 

                                                                                              LOOK.

I want to invert the scale of birds to humans, making birds as imposing as they are important, on the off -chance that people won’t ignore them the way they walk down a street without noticing the universe of wings and melodies just above their heads.

My inspiration comes from the Italian and Dutch Renaissance masters who made their fortunes (or saved their own necks) with the skill and optimism through which they portrayed their subjects. Their royals and mistresses are preserved for eternity; imbued with equanimity that has endured, erasing the temporal anxieties of bloody battles and palace perfidy. Through a thousand details, sitters are made to look important, worthy of having been painted. They are birdlike, with their feathers and lace and the way their eyes and satins shine.

In nearly every way, my paintings fail to capture what is remarkable about my subjects. Unlike the frozen image on my canvas, an actual Rose-breasted Grosbeak is more alive to the world around him than humans can conceive, let alone reproduce through painting. Landing, looking, turning, considering, he drops down, hops up, flips around to scan the dome of sky and treetops. Black and white from behind in unremarkable feathered plaid, he blends in with the other returning migrants. Turning to face you, he becomes a superhero: Clark Kent transforming into Superman, white shirt split open to reveal that iconic chest. Getting a peek of his crimson-splashed underwings when he spreads them feels intimate. Like catching a super hero in his underpants.

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My earliest bird memories are from Canada, where we went one year on a “family” vacation to indulge my father’s singular passion for catching fish. I am standing, a full three-and-a-half feet tall, with closed eyes and open palm held up to the sky and dripping with fish guts. From a gyre somewhere above me, cries muffled by ocean (or great lake?) waves, a gull swoops down and empties my hand without making my arm sway. I can still taste the wet, salty air, feel the slimy, pearlescent organs, the flush of excitement and the dangerous precision of that bill.  

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I tend to use the word god as profanity more often than not, and frankly have a good time doing it. But the whole natural world, particularly those who fly through it, is sacred. It’s a righteous congregation, as more-than-white people have recognized for many thousands of years. The Nazca Lines in Peru include a Hummingbird that is 320 feet long, a Condor that’s about 443 feet and a Pelican, at a grand 935 feet. Relative to these, my paintings are less than the size of a postage stamp.

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I learned there was such a thing as birding in the late 1980s, from a man named Vernon Laux, who lived on Martha’s Vineyard. I knew him first as the real estate guy who sold us some land in Chilmark. He was giant-sized and loud, with an appetite for everything; the kind of visitor who has your refrigerator door open to see what’s left over from the dinner you cooked the night before, before he finishes saying hello, which I suspected he knew was also the way to my heart. Vern would drive around the Vineyard with us, telling the inside stories of who lived where and what celebrities were on the island at the moment. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing or talking about, his attention never fully left the sky. He saw birds from far away, and would tell me about a species and its gender and character at a distance from which I was lucky to see the tree. He spotted movement first, he explained, then could dial in his eyes to focus further, like adjusting a set of good binoculars. 

One day, an hour or two before sunset, Vernon took my husband and me for a careful drive on the beaches of the island, introducing us to a world of spindle-legged runners, sand-nesters, spear- fishers, and long-distance fliers who would likely still be unknown to me had I not hung out for a few summers with Vernon Laux.

It turns out Vern was famous among birders. He spotted the erratic Red-footed Falcon who was on Martha’s Vineyard, when he should have been in Eastern Europe or Asia, and started a stampede of other birders to check his work. I now read the articles he wrote for the Vineyard Gazette or Bird Observer; one in particular is a twelve- page, spot-by-spot, detailed set of instructions for birders on how to see the most birds on their island visit. It is his curriculum vitae. Every sentence reveals the countless hours he has spent observing myriad species of birds and their habits at different times of year and weathers. I realize, after his too-early death, how much he saw, how much I missed in my nearsighted, short-sighted ignorance. Yet for all of that, I knew Vernon Laux and he will always be a part of who I am. We now live with a bird dog named Vernon.

Both young people and birds are in crisis. The former suffer from depression and mental illness beyond what any prior generation has known. Suicides have doubled in the last few years in teenagers and tripled among kids from ten to fourteen. They are falling in love less, and have relationships with their screens that are more real to them than those with other people. Birds are in crisis because we are decimating the planet in our quest to fill the emptiness that eats our species from the inside out. If young people are the future guardians of the planet, don’t they have to know of its existence first?

If hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, where does hope live in the thing with feathers itself?

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I spend a lot of time with young people, and always ask them about their relationship with nature. They mention outdoor sports. When I clarified that I meant wild nature, a girl from Buffalo said that every once in a while a bug lands on her. A young man mentioned deer that eat the shrubs in his parents’s yard. When I asked a whole class of college students (at the number 2 ranked school in the country) about birds in particular, they first laughed, and then, when it became clear I wasn’t joking, someone said, “You mean the ones that live outside?”

A woman I know has written a book about grief. She is grieving humans of course. Because grief requires knowing what is lost.