ANOTHER TIME-LAPSE PAINTING CLIP

Eastern Painted Turtle

THE MANDATORY FOURTH OF JULY POLITICAL POST

As in much of the country, conservatives are throwing “Tea Parties” here today in protest of what they see as irresponsible spending of federal funds. I'm sympathetic with the basic gist of their gripe and agree that only fools spend their money faster than they earn it (such behavior, of course, is always temporary). I notice though, that the loudest voices are the same ones shouting “drill baby drill,” and can't for the life of me figure how they reconcile their monetary and natural resource policies. However much you love it, the former is the abstract element of the two, and is wholly dependent on the latter. Despite my sympathy with the conservatives' denouncing our living beyond our financial means, I'm still more inclined to protest our using up our real resources faster than they're replenished. At this point it would be appropriate to post a Bald Eagle painting, but I've never painted one. Another big endemic American bird will have to do. Happy Fourth of July!
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illustration: CALIFORNIA CONDOR (2008) acrylic 30" x 20"

ART OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM XIV

Today, Saturday, June 13th, The Bennington Center for the Arts will host the opening of their annual exhibition of animal art, Art of the Animal Kingdom. This year's Special Guest Artist is the newly-Canadianized Terry Isaac who will give a presentation at 11 in the morning. It promises to be entertaining and enlightening, but that's just too early for me. The exhibition,which is accompanied by a full-colored catalog, runs through July 26th.
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illustration: RUFFED LEMUR & PANTHER CHAMELEON (2007) acrylic 18" x 24"

WILDLIFE ART JOURNAL

Back in 1988, when I decided to try to make it as an animal painter, my work had never been shown in public and I was as ignorant of the outside world of wildlife art as it was of me. The task of changing that reality seemed daunting, but I had a secret weapon at my disposal. Wildlife Art News was a bi-monthly periodical that featured articles about artists, exhibitions and the natural world. Like most of its ilk, it was almost offensively shy about being offensively denigrating, but I couldn't have asked for a better window through which to peer and plan my attack. New clues to understanding this world were offered with each issue and myriad opportunities for the aspiring wildlife artist were enumerated before me. Before long, the whole staff became good friends, both professionally and personally. Without the nice coverage they gave my work, I would likely be scrubbing urinals instead of typing this post. In the early oughts, the publisher, Bob Koenke, retired and sold the magazine, which moved from being a labor of love to one of commerce, and ultimately mailed out its final issue in the summer of '07.

After nearly two years of absence, frequent Wildlife Art News contributor Todd Wilkinson has launched an online journal to fill its vacant niche. Todd, whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, etc., and has published a number of books, including Science Under Siege, expects this new publication, WILDLIFE ART JOURNAL, to be broader in scope than was its predecessor. He hopes to showcase more iconoclastic artwork from artists working in every part of the globe. So far, it appears to be off to a nice start.
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illustration: LANJAK DAWN (2009) acrylic 20" x 30"

FALCONER ON THE EDGE

I grew up in Emigration Canyon, Utah, which, 15 years earlier, had been a small, rural, working-class town with a distinctive culture. Fifteen years later and it would become a rich bedroom community that would all but extirpate that old culture. The community I knew seemed much closer to the former than the latter, but that could have been because I naturally gravitated towards those elements. One of those distinctive cultural peccadilloes was falconry, a practice that many local boys indulged in. More often than not, it was a passing fancy, but for a number of us, the rare privilege of developing close personal relationships with complex, wild predators led to insight and obsession that would shape the rest of our lives. None of us were quite like Steve Chindgren, though. His passion for falconry and his drive to excel in it reached an almost absurd level. By the time he was 20, he was hawking game more successfully than most, and 37 years later, it's probably safe to say that no person alive has taken more wild game with falcons.

Meanwhile, in upstate New York, writer Rachel Dickinson was trying to understand her falconer husband's own obsessions. She decided to contact a second falconer – a stranger – and study him as her own subject, get to know him, write about him, and hopefully, grow to understand falconry. She couldn't have picked a better subject when she called Steve, and this book is the result of her journey.

It's an odd experience to read a book about a good friend whom you've known all your life. Dickinson draws a portrait that's quite accurate, though. I spotted a few factual errors, but they're pretty insignificant ones. (For example, two long-dead Gyrfalcons, one gray and the other dark-phased, are both described as “white.”) A number of different routes were available to an author seeking to write a book about a complicated guy like Steve, and, although she touches a number different topics (his efforts at Sage Grouse conservation and raptor breeding, his feuds with the law, and how falconry has molded him philosophically), Dickinson seems mostly interested in how the sport has affected his life, both professional and, especially, familial, and how he and his wife and daughters have worked around it. My own preference would have put a tighter focus on Steve's philosophy, and the supreme paradox of his life, as I see it, how the Sage Grouse and their habitat, which mean so much to him, are threatened by the petroleum industry that makes it possible for him to hawk that wonderful country.

Not only does Dickinson render Chindgren in a fully recognizable way, but she does the same for the art of falconry. Towards the end of the book she wonders if she'll ever really understand the discipline that captured her husband so fully, but in her prose she displays that, on some level at least, she gets it.
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 240 pages 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches 11.2 ounces

PAINTERS OF UTAH'S CANYONS AND DESERTS

Strangely enough, last Friday (my birthday) saw the release of two books with particular personal significance for me. Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts was timed to coincide with the centennial celebration of Zions National Park in the state's southwest. The fact of its concurrence with the news of what seems to be the solution to the Everett Ruess mystery is purely serendipitous. Ruess, a California native, was an artist, printmaker, writer and vagabond who loved the Utah redrock, where he famously vanished nearly 75 years ago at the age of 20. Denny Belson, acting on a story his grandfather had told him, found a human crevice burial near Comb Ridge, on the Navajo Reservation, over 100 miles east of what was thought to be Ruess' last camp. Belson's grandfather, a Navajo, claimed to have witnessed the murder and robbery of a white man by two Utes in the '30s, and had returned to the site to bury the man. Only days ago, forensic analysis determined the remains to be Ruess'.

His story is one of the most compelling, but he is only one of dozens of great artists who've been inspired by the spectacular, rugged country of the Colorado Plateau. Two of the state's most respected art historians, Vern Swanson, PhD, director of the Springville Museum of Art, and Donna Poulton, PhD, associate curator at the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts, have compiled this weighty volume with over 300 paintings, chronicling the artistic depiction of our state's canyon country. The unfortunate tradition with such histories is to begin the tale with the in-migration of white settlers, and this one is no exception. The earliest work dates to the period of the first Mormon pioneers' arrival. Still, the history detailed from that period on can only be described as comprehensive. The illustrations are well selected and reproduced. I was especially pleased with the several plates of my favorite Utah artist, Doug Snow, who merges abstract and representational painting more successfully than anyone else I know. The accompanying text is well researched and nicely written, except for the fact that my name isn't spelled exactly right, but this isn't the first book to have erred there.
Two upcoming events will celebrate this book: Tomorrow evening (May 7th) at 6:30, there will be a short lecture and a book signing at Williams Fine Art on 2nd East and South Temple, and on Friday, May 15th a small exhibition and book signing at Ken Sanders' Rare Books on 2nd East and Broadway.
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Gibbs Smith Publisher 12.8 x 11 x 1.3 inches 304 pages 5.6 lbs.

MASTERPIECES IN MINIATURE

This weekend, Masterpieces in Miniature opens at Picture This! gallery in Sherwood Park, Alberta. The show, featuring paintings less than 155 square inches by 40 invited North American artists, officially opens on Saturday, May 2nd, and runs through the public drawing on May 21st. The entire show, including my "Wilson's Bird of Paradise" (above) can be seen online, and intent-to-purchase forms can be filed over the internet over the duration of the show.
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illustration: WILSON'S BIRD OF PARADISE (2008) acrylic 6" x 9"

QUIZ RESULTS

Having such a smart readership is both gratifying and terrifying. Yesterday the Rigor Vitae ID quiz was trounced once again within the span of a couple of hours. Obviously, the photo was of a softshell turtle of the family Trionychidae, but closer identification was much trickier. The heavy lifting was done this time by Neil of Microecos, who correctly identified the subject as belonging to the genus Cyclanorbis, the African flap-shell turtles. I was unable to honor his request for a beetle box, and his coin-toss for the species came up tails. Had he done a Google image search for "Cyclanorbis," he'd have seen that I'd posted the picture earlier with the proper ID, which is what I suspect he did right after the fact. That proper ID (C. senegalensis) was supplied by Andrew R. Special thanks to hand-model Paco, whose distinctive arm-tone seemed to direct everyone to the correct continent. Aside from the prefrontal bones, the Senegal Flapshell is smaller and darker, with a narrower and differently-shaped shell (it also has distinctive throat callosities which aren't visible in the picture). No votes came in for the related and poorly-known genus Cyloderma, but C.J. covered the last base by taking up the card for Trionyx triunguis, the African Softshell (pictured above). A big applause to you all. I think it's only fair to declare the quiz a tie, so if Andrew and Neil can email me at cpbvkATjunoDOTcom with their subject requests and mailing addresses, I'll get to work on their drawings.
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photo taken in southern Cameroon by CPBvK

ANOTHER QUIZ

Grab your field guides, it's quiz time again. Last month's puzzler turned out to be easier than I expected; Clare barely gave me time to punch the "publish" button before correctly identifying it, with several correct responses following quickly behind him. This time, then, we'll try something devoid of feathers -- still, not a terribly hard one. The creature in the photo above is typical of its species. The first person to comment with the correct species before the end of May 6th will receive a pencil drawing of the subject of their choice. Good luck!
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photo by CPBvK