Finding Deep Creative Inspiration

Books, words, and art are real and so are our phones and computers and everything that is online. But they are also all made up by us and mostly about us. They can describe the world but they are not the wider world in which we are intertwined and depend on.

While we are quite aware that we relate to and learn from other people, we can also relate to and learn from other animate beings. If you think about it, in order to survive, most of our time on earth we have paid closer attention to other creatures and our environment than we do now. We still have that ability hard-wired into us, it is just dampened when we live in cities and in our books and phones and computers.

Creatures still have to pay close attention to us. For example, a bird you are watching is certainly aware of and relating to you in some way. I think that we are still on some deep level, more aware of the creatures and objects around us than we know.

I often sit still with a feather in my hand, letting the busyness drain away. The feather speaks, not in words, but in a different kind of perception . Often for me, it is akin to a kinesthetic feeling. Or it may be a knowing that doesn’t seem to just be a product of my thoughts or imagination but somehow also involves the feather.

Hummingbird Flower?

A friend flew in for a visit from the city wearing bright red lipstick. While she was standing near the hummingbird feeder she became excited and a little flustered when a hummingbird faced her lips, hovering there for ten full seconds.

Of course, that put my visual art-mind to working which resulted in several small studies.

I began by searching through feathers that had splotched of red to represent the lips. The perfect feathers were from the wing of an amazon parrot feather and the tail of a male red-black cockatoo. They have a splotch of bright red and the rest of the feathers are jet black. I made two pieces. When I finished and looked at them I realized that they reminded me of white people making fun of black people by painting their faces black and making big white (and sometimes red) lips. So instead, I made this one out of an amazon parrot tail feather.

Human Figures in Wildlife art?

Birds are the focus of my work. Since they fly and we cannot, they and their feathers are symbols of our aspirations. They have  meaning for us. Plus, since birds can fly and escape, they aren't afraid to show themselves, unlike, for instance, mice. So they are eminently observable.  

I haven't usually carved people into my creations. This is because we tend to focus only on ourselves when thinking about this world, to the exclusion of other creatures. So I like to give birds a voice.

However birds represent some of our actual, mythical, environmental, and personal connections to the world. So I have begun to explore this relationship using human-ish silhouettes. When drawing people figures, it struck me how much we consist of long arms and legs plus big hands and a round head--like stick figures. I wonder if that is how other creatures may initially see us. 

Necessity

Peacock and Quills #3

A woman whose big male peacock had died asked me to make a piece out of his display feathers. The problem was, she had only a few of his feathers and only one of them was big enough and in good enough shape to carve. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? I liked what I came up with here.

Tiny Feather Details

My work is precise and detailed, right? Well … only sort of. This enlarged cutout is 1/3 of an inch high. At this detail, you can see all sorts of cutting errors that you don’t see when the image is not blown up. But now look at the detail of the feather itself. It is perfect. Notice how the red, green and black colors blend seamlessly into one another. See how the barbs of the feather arise from the shaft and perfectly align with each other. You cannot improve a feather.

How to Find Deep Creative Inspiration

mallard duck feather

Put away your books and electronics to be with what is real. Let me explain: books and words are real and so are our phones and computers and everything that is online. But they are all made up by us and all about us, not the wider world that we live in. They can describe the wider world but they are not the wider world in which we are intertwined and depend on.

Plants and animals and even the rocks, clouds, rivers, and mountains all move in time as do we. While we are quite aware that we relate to and learn from other people, we can also relate to and learn from other animate beings. If you think about it, most of our time on earth we had to pay closer attention to other creatures and our environment just as they continue to pay attention to us. We still have that ability hard-wired into us, it is just dampened for most of us as we live in cities and in our books and phones and computers.

For instance, a bird you are watching is certainly aware of and relating to you in some way. There is a back and forth. It isn’t merely a product of your imagination as popular culture often pooh poohs. It is a real thing.

I often sit still with a feather in my hand, letting the busyness drain away. The feather speaks, not in words, but in a different kind of perception often akin to a kinesthetic feeling. Or it may be a knowing that doesn’t seem to just be a product of my thoughts or imagination but somehow also involves the feather.

Feather art highlights article about bird loss in North America

Firmament

https://www.audubon.org/news/north-america-has-lost-more-1-4-birds-last-50-years-new-study-says

Fantastic Bird Names that Make You Smile

Firecrown . ocellated turkey feathers . 12 x 12 inches

Hummingbird names dazzle the imagination. Here is a list of words used to name them:

Rainbow . Gorget . Coquette . Golden . Comet . Hillstar . Metaltail . Colorful . Fiery . Helmetcrest . Sungem . Violet . Crowned . Blossom . Sparkling . Mountaingem . Topaz . Coppery . Iridescent . Prizmal . Sunangel . Emerald . Crimson . Blossom . Beryline . Sylph . Brilliant . Woodnymph . Gilded . Glowing . Streamertail . Azure . Magenta . Star . Rainbow . Sunbeam . Festive . Shining . Glittering . Spangled . Firecrown . Royal . Oasis . Woodstar . Calliope . Volcano . Scintiliant . Glow .Garnet

Guide for When to Capitalize Bird Names

Swan Reflection, Mute Swan feathers

The English language has protocols and rules for when to capitalize and when not to. City names and our own names for instance are always supposed to be capitalized. Often scientific creature names have capitals and common names do not.

A capital letter is an honor bestowed. Where we decide on the proper placement of capital letters tends to leave out and thereby diminish creatures like birds by grouping them without capitals. Our capital letter protocols trend toward elevating ourselves (our proper names and also like, “the English, the French, etc.), what we have made (like names of cars: Ford Taurus), and scientific endeavors (like genus names). This is another way that we set ourselves apart from the natural world. To remedy this in a small way, I am changing my writing to capitalize the common names of birds, like Mute Swan instead of mute swan. It is going to take some effort to break the habit. Perhaps I will appreciate and honor these creatures a bit more.

How to Store and Keep Feathers

From my previous post on Care of Feathers, I received an informative comment from Amy Reineri: Be careful of storing feathers or other natural materials in sealed containers if you live in a more humid environment. Trapped air that has any moisture, if subjected to temperature changes that take it through it's dew point, will deposit and withdraw moisture from the contents of the bag and this can fatigue the materials to the point they decompose. Feathers, leather, dried insects - all of these will decompose due to the humidity cycle if kept in a sealed container with variable temperatures. If you choose to store something in a sealed bag, you can put hygroscopic crystals in with them or you should keep them in the same temperature environment you bagged them in.

That said, if you vacuum-seal your bagged feathers thereby taking the air out, water absorption would not be a problem. I usually just squeeze the air out by hand and call it good. Feathers under 35% moisture can get so dry that they become brittle. A sealed shadowbox using acid-neutral components with UV protected acrylic kept in a stable environment is a better long-term storage container than plastic bags.

Here is a link to a museum’s more thorough explanation of how to keep feathers.

How to Become Beautiful

EnTrance, peacock feathers, 22 x 18 inches

Beauty is everywhere. Finding it is just a matter of noticing, slowing down, moving toward it, and being surrounded.

Look What the Stork Brought

This stork on an egg was the first toy that I was given when I was born. Some said the stork brought me but then why would other people say that my mother did a good job? Notice that it's a bird? Perhaps this was a beginning of my fascination with birds and feathers.

While walking the beach recently, I witnessed rows and rows of tiny broken down plastic pieces in the rocks and sand at the high tide line. Perhaps they wouldn’t be there if every piece of plastic manufactured was as sacred to its user as this plastic toy is to me.

Why Birds Are Protected: A History of Fashion 100 Years Ago

This history of the bird feather fashion trade just over 100 years ago is jaw-dropping for the amounts of birds that were killed. This website link lists kinds of species killed, number killed and prices for each. For instance, to quote an entry , “six egrets to yield one “ounce” of aigrette plumes. This being the case, the 21,528 ounces sold over a nine moth period, as above table states, translates as 129,168 egrets killed for the London plume markets alone.”

Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds, Millinery Crafts and the Plumage Trade is an exhibition conceived and created by Dr Merle Patchett © 2011.

In the early part of the 20th century the business of killing birds for the millinery trade was practiced on a large scale, involving the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds in many parts of the world.

In North America, the Heron family was favoured due to its abundance and beautiful wispy feathers. By the turn of the 20th century, this trade had nearly eliminated egrets in the US, and populations of numerous other bird species around the globe were also approaching extinction.

Reports of these atrocities led to the formation of the first Audubon and conservation societies, who sought to ban the trade and persuade ladies not to use plumage for their own adornment. Campaigns against ‘murderous millinery’ by the Audubon Society in the US and the RSPB in the UK initiated wildlife protection acts which eventually prohibited both national and international commerce in protected bird species.

This section of the Dr. Patchett’s exhibition seeks to outline the extent of the business of killing birds for the millinery trade and to evidence the efforts of various individuals and groups to bring an end to the international plumage trade.

How to Identify Feathers

The website Featherbase is a great place to see a lot of different kinds of feathers and maybe even to identify a feather for yourself. I enjoyed roaming around on their site; it is well put together. The rest is quoted from their website introduction.

"Since the 20th century, scientific ornithology has been closely linked to the conservation of birds. The study of feathers is one such factor that is often overlooked. In museums, the majority of their bird skin collections are archived, stored away in drawers under lock and key and only ever seen by a very selective audience and not the general public.

The Austrian behavioural scientist Konrad Lorenz once said: "You only love what you know, and you only protect what you love." Being able to touch, feel and study a feather in the hand engages people, especially children, with nature; what child hasn’t stopped to pick up a feather in a park or their backyard and marvel at it, and wonder what bird it came from. From a long, slender Arctic Tern primary, which has undertaken an incredible migratory journey of around 44,000 miles from pole to pole, to the soft, downy feather of a Barn Owl, helping the bird to fly on silent wings as it hunts at night; every feather has a fascinating story to tell, each so unique in its makeup, shape, form, texture, colour and function they serve to the bird. Feathers can teach us so much about birds and how they live. They bring people closer to the natural world – and therefore play an important role in its preservation.

Featherbase is a working group of German feather scientists who came together with their personal collections and created the biggest and most comprehensive online feather library in the world. Using our website, it is possible to identify feathers from hundreds of different species, compare similarities between species, work out gender or age-specific characteristics and look at the statistics of countless feather measurements.

In contrast to the conventional work of museums, Featherbase is much more oriented towards the general public, allowing not just enrolled scientists the opportunity to gain access to the collection, but anyone with an interest in studying birds and their feathers. Featherbase also frequently collaborates with scientific or educational organizations by offering images, data or teamwork in general. Featherbase works completely independently, without administrative affiliation, and first and foremost without commercial interests. We are a non-profit making entity and funded entirely by our own contributors. The collecting of feathers and skins for our database is approved by the relevant authorities, and for any protected/CITES listed species held, we are fastidious about maintaining records of their origin."

Feather Star

These creatures use their “feathers” to fly. It is a lot easier to do in dense water than flying in the air as anyone knows who has flapped their arms in both elements

Choices

An Unusual Event . turkey feathers

Do you ever go to the grocery store and feel that the many decisions choices of say, all the different shampoos, drives you crazy? I do. The other day I tried to decide between 9 different varieties of apples. That’s a lot of information to process but mostly I didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision so I just guessed. I would have been more certain, calmer, and happier with less choices or none.

This is titled, "An Unusual Event". It may feel usual for some of us to be able to go to the store and be offered such abundance but historically and considering all the shaky chains of supply that we have recently developed, it really is unusual.

Change

Light Crane Shower . argus pheasant feathers . 55 x 30 inches

Things do not stay the same no matter how much I would like them to. Movement is the only constant in my life. I try holding on but all it ever gets me is feeling dissatisfied, stuck, and worried.

This is why I try to impart feelings of movement, of flow in my artistic creations.

The Latest in a Series

Marsh Cattail Wren Duck Feather study #2, mallard speculum wing feather

I expect that many creative people ask themselves this question, “Shall I pursue new ideas or refine old ones?” I have sketched several hundred ideas for carved feathers in a my journals. Only a fifth of them have been used to create my art. The rest of the sketches sit in my journal. I rarely refer to the older drawings. In December, I told myself that I would, so I marked a few promising looking older sketches and picked one to pursue. After I created one, it fostered other ideas that used that same concept. Today I made the 12th piece, three larger pieces and nine small studies, the latest is pictured here. I have not had time to even look at the other drawings in my journal.

Many of the pieces in a series like this are creative refinements of the original which I find quite worthwhile to make. However, this is one reason why it is hard to create something from every sketch if the act of following one idea leads to another which leads to another and so on.

Male mallard secondary wing feathers are called speculum feathers. I don't know why for certain but it is likely because the blue portions are reflective, the structurally formed blues reflect the light sort of like a mirror. Besides the lovely shine, I thought they had a vague cattail shape to them. Plus, ducks like wet places next to cattails.

Disappearing Birds

When birds disappear from my neighborhood in part because of all the new housing developments, life loses some of its color.

This piece has been long in the imagining as well as the engineering. I still have a ways to go. The grey carved feather is from a true tail feather of a peacock. These tail feathers are meant to support all the colorful display feathers that grow on the back of the male peacock which we often mistakenly call “the tail”.

The boxes will have bottles with colorful feathers inside, perhaps as memories of what once was.

Where Are the Big Colorful Feathers?

Marsh Cattail Wren . 7 x 5 inches . amazon parrot secondary wing feathers

Except for feathers from a couple of parrots like macaws tails, birds do not have large colorful feathers. Most colorful feathers are small. When color is on wing feathers, I have noticed that the bright colors are placed where they can be hidden, like on the secondary wing feathers.

The three to five-inch small feathers with a bit of color require compositions of many feathers for my commonly sized pieces of 12 inches or bigger. However, when I have a design idea that use just one or two of these small feathers, the finished piece will have to be smaller.

These amazon parrot secondary flight feathers sport the bright red in this picture that reminded me of the shape of cattails. Cattails are not red of course but if they were, they would pose a fine juxtaposition to the marsh wrens whose colors are so brownly-muted cattail-colored that they are quite difficult to spot. Usually, all I see is a hint of movement, maybe the rustle of a cattail stalk.