Art is a language without words. So is music. Both can go where words cannot. Birds make sophisticated and complex sounds—music. Although it is hard to put their songs in our musical scales and ledgers like I have tried to do here.

This cut peacock feather is a bit abstract, a little more divorced from my real experience with the birds themselves. I enjoy making these kinds of designs but find it is difficult to incorporate them into larger pieces where I want the inspiration to arise more from my knowledge of, experience with, and respect for the birds themselves. Placing this design on a few black T-shirts, I gave a few to my friends.

Ravens don't migrate much. They don't fly in flocks much either. And they appear as jet black to us. So this piece is all wrong!

However, Ravens' feathers sport a sheen that reflects light not as black but ephemeral colors like green, lavender, blue, copper, and purple. In addition, Ravens likely see much more color in the feathers of their fellows than we do. This is because they see the four "primary" colors of ultraviolet in addition to the yellow, red, and blue colors that we see. Like yellow and red mixes into orange, ultraviolet combines with the other colors to create rich tapestries that we can only imagine. 

It is hard to organize a book into a pleasantly flowing story. Especially with over two hundred images of my art! I printed the spreadsheet of images and associated writing, cut it up, and placed each part on a three-foot, one meter high piece of card-stock paper with removable glue. I found it much easier to envision the book when I can see everything at once and move it with my hands. I can move pieces according to the writing and the image themes, colors, subject matter, flow, and many other considerations. At the end, I would have had a book well over three hundred pages! That is too big for the table top art book that I envision, and too pricey. Instead, I will be breaking it up into four books! The first one will be out in mid-2026. The theme is Meaning, since feathers have so much symbology for people around the world. The second one will be about Flight. The third about Biology, and for fourth about my Art process.

My first book, Feathers Form and Function has been out of print for two years and I am thinking of having a small run made so they will be available again. What do you think?

I hear from writers that they often find it helpful to let their writing sit for an hour, a day, or more. When they come back, they hope to see it afresh. Often they quickly realize what needs improvement and how to fix it. I do the same with this blog.

I also do it with my art. I struggled toward placing the 15 cutout cranes in this piece but was not satisfied. After three days I tried again. A few days later after a third try I was pleased.

The process is pleasing also. Sort of a discipline. I have to let go getting immediate results, delaying my gratification over completing each piece. The result is always better.

Life offers two features in abundance: beauty and horror. So how does a sane person cope? Focus on one side of this, the beauty? Watch horror movies?  Emphasize sacredness and specialness of existence? For me, I find an underlying theme of humor provides some balance. People often say that my pieces have a bit of comedy. I don’t usually try to do that but I like it when a piece makes me smile. Especially when the title fits.

Each of the bird’s flight feathers is attached to the wing bone. You know how a bird folds its wings to its body when it lands? And how a feather spreads out evenly when it opens its wings to fly? There is a ligiment that runs the entire way along the forward edge of the wing so the feathers spread out evenly when the bird opens its wings.

It is not only feathers that make a bird fly. They are only the most obvious. The entire bird’s body is adapted for flying—like lite and hollow bones and the way the bones are shaped to attach the muscles. Birds also have special ways of breathing to assist in powering muscles for flight. They have skeletons where much of the back bones fused as one to help keep them stable during flight. As such, their bodies are sort of football shaped. To have flexibility, they have long necks with perhaps three times as many vertebrae as us. They have no teeth, that would be too heavy. Instead they have bills made out of keratin, the same substance that their feathers are made of but arranged in a very different way.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris Maynard | Featherfolio (@featherfolio)

Finding the perfect feather…

A perfect feather can be hard to find. Birds wear their feathers for about a year before they they grow new ones and shed the old, so of course shed feathers are worn. These shed Mountain Peacock Pheasants are often notoriously too messed up for my art. I can try to preen them with my fingers to get them in better shape. But of this whole pile of feathers, I found only two that I could possibly use.

Much of my work has been contained in shadowboxes with museum acrylic protection. But the work is durable enough for wall installations which I have been doing more of this year. This work was installed in the Beverly Hills area of Los Angeles during the 2025 January fires!

Katrina von Gruow wrote and illustrated The Unfeathered Bird in which she arranged birds without skin and often only the bones into poses of activity like flight. She agreed for me to stylize some of her illustrations into carved feathers. After all, this is what is underneath all those feathers that allows the bird to power flight.

Although we don't often see them because they live over open ocean, the small Wilson's Storm Petrel is among the most abundant of birds. They flutter about like butterflies, not so much landing on the water but dancing with their feet on the surface of the wave troughs. 

Grouse have these millipede-like growths in the winter, presumably to act like snowshoes. In the spring, they are shed in a yearly molt like the bird sheds its feathers every year. Only the toe growths don’t grow back until the next fall. I probably won’t be doing anything with them like I do with shed feathers!

Ideas and inspirations come through many channels. It isn’t the artist doing it but being open up to possibilities and being part of a conduit. Feathers though, present a challenge because they only come in the natural colors and sizes that the bird grows

So the feathers as my medium set severe limits. When I am inspired, I have to figure out how to accomplish an inspiration using only feathers as my line, form, color and size. So I need to approach this type of design problem from many angles. I sketch many possible ideas knowing most of them will not work. It is kind of like a brain storm in my sketchbook

The family name for Flamingoes is Phoenicopterae, from the word phoenix.

It makes sense in a way because these birds live in fire, sort of. They inhabit environments that are too extreme for any other bird or mammal. They gather and breed in super salty and alkaline environments that would quickly kill other creatures. They can drink very hot water, close to boiling. As Katrina von Gruow writes in The Unfeathered Bird, “Flamingoes are really very special birds indeed and, with their carmine wings, emerging from the intense chemical heat of the tropical salt lakes, certainly worthy of the name “phoenix".”

Look at this Toucan’s tongue! A feathered bird with a feathery tongue. A toucan’s beak can be as long as its body and comes with a tongue to match. The bird seems to use it as a tool to get sticky food down its throat as well as to taste the food before deciding to swallow it or not.

An artist gets inspiration from many sources: other artists, the natural world, animals, people, and many others. I got this inspiration from the top feather. To me, it was so obviously like a sunrise that it practically dictated this piece. That’s the thing about perfect natural feathers, am not going to paint a sunset on a feather because I want to honor the natural color. Both feathers are from an Amazon Parrot, about five inches long so the final piece is only 5 x 7 inches.

We make stories as an important way of making sense of the world and take them seriously even though they are never perfect reflections of reality. Like when someone tailgates me, I think “they are doing this on purpose to bother me” when most likely the tailgater either has a bad habit or is just absorbed with getting somewhere. It probably has nothing to do with intentionally trying to bother me.

This seriousness about our stories partly why I like to make up stories that are not so serious. Like this title which could be part of a larger story.

I’m attracted to feathery shapes and feather analogies. While a bird’s feathers allow the bird to live in two mediums: on land and in the air; the Axolotl’s feathery gills allow them to live their lives in the water even though they also have lungs and can breathe air like us. These creatures lived in a couple of lakes near Mexico City but now they are mostly gone. However, they are easily bred and genetically manipulated so are abundant in the pet trade. Unlike feathers, these frilly fills are never shed so I wouldn’t use them in my art!

About 21 minutes into this almost hour-long documentary, PBS placed an eight-minute section about my art. The best part about it for me and also the most vulnerable, is toward the end when they filmed me dancing in my studio. I do love to dance as it comes closest to capturing a feeling of flight. This feeling of movement is important in my art and it can translate to a feeling of motion in the final pieces that I make.

Permalink

]]>Chris MaynardMon, 11 Nov 2024 21:09:00 +0000https://www.featherfolio.com/blog/pelicanesis57bb847de4fcb5cba1dfe320:5820d3fc14fd83981ed74959:66f1cae7d918e653b82b19be

What if we can attract things like food by some unseen power like telekinesis?

Life offers two features in abundance: beauty and horror. For me, I find an underlying theme of humor provides some balance. People often say that my pieces have a bit of comedy. I don’t usually try for humor, but I like it when a piece makes me smile. Especially when the title fits.

Bright colors are rare in feathers, especially large ones. It is at least partly ok for the birds to show their colors because they feel safe – which is because they can fly and get away, unlike mice who are always dull grey or brown. Imagine a mouse with these bright colors! It might be popular in the pet trade but the mice would not last long in the wild.