I won’t say I’m a collector of old books, but I’ve got more than a few and each one has some special meaning. I’ve got a book of imagined spacecraft from the late ‘70’s where the publisher commissioned artists to paint spacecraft of our (and our encountered systems) future with a nice narrative weaved throughout. It was a favorite of myself and my 5th grade chums. It had a hopeful theme given we were in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union; we’d put our differences aside and reach for the stars.
I wasn’t that hopeful. My biggest fear was nuclear Armageddon, and this peppered my literary choices. I read ‘Canticle for Leibowitz’ early in my Junior year of high school. To generalize, the story spans thousands of years after a nuclear war and monks in a monastery find and hide bits of our history until man is ready again. My subconscious drank from this well. I imagined a world where ‘History Tapes’ were left behind and sketched scenes during class…. I know, big surprise…. I kept a few.
The old book/history tape theme I wanted to creatively tap but held it in reserve. I tried to tap it in college for a creative writing set of classes, but…never mind that now. Recently, I came across an old book by George Miksch Sutton about Mexican Birds. He and two other colleagues from the University of Oklahoma journeyed to Mexico to study birds south of the Rio Grande. He was a fine artist in his own right and provided many wonderful watercolors in the text. These watercolors provided the history tape rekindling.
As most of you know, I paint birds on vintage maps to mark their place in this time with us. They may face their own Armageddon if we don’t change our ways. The earth is warming and the oceans are filling with plastics. Regardless of your opinion about the causation of climate change, it is changing. This piece with the Atlantic Puffin titled ‘Figure 3 – Atlantic Puffin’ is my updated version (or versions…more to come in this format) of the history tape drawings I did as a teenager. Hopefully they won’t be used as a history tape….
The left side portion was done on Japanese calligraphy rice paper. I treated it with medium because the paper can be fragile. The egg and puffling were done using acrylic gouache and I intentionally left some pencil lines around the egg. The type fonts were done almost like a rubbing. I used Photoshop for the text and reversed the image and printed. While the ink was still moist I used a hard pencil to transfer.
The map is a 1909 topographic map of Bar Harbor, Maine from the USGS. I once again used Photoshop and boosted vibrancy and sharpened some of the text and map lines. Both the rice paper side and the map were then mounted to a birch panel followed by three coats of matte medium. The medium preps and protects the surface for painting. Over three days I completed the rock and the Puffin. My goal was to have the appearance of a page out of a book from 1940.
