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"Golden Feather Study" is a work in which two great artistic passions are most completely and most beautifully reconciled — the tradition of natural history illustration, with its demand for precise scientific observation and its long distinguished history of images that are simultaneously documents and works of art, and the textile artist's sensibility that understands surface, texture, and the physical properties of materials as themselves expressive, as themselves capable of carrying meaning and feeling independently of any depicted subject. The work depicts a single large flight feather — the primary feather of a golden eagle, one of the most magnificent birds of the Scottish Highland landscape — rendered at life scale against the warm, slightly textured surface of handmade cotton paper.
The feather is drawn in lithographic line with extraordinary precision and confidence — every individual barb of the feather's vane rendered separately, the rachis (the central shaft) drawn with a single continuous line of such authority and sensitivity that it seems to have been made in one breath, the complex transition from the firm flight-functional outer vane to the softer more loosely structured inner vane documented with the exactitude of a scientist and the love of someone who has spent years learning to look at feathers as the masterpieces of evolutionary engineering they are. Over this lithographic foundation, hand-coloring has been applied in thin transparent washes of watercolor mixed with a small amount of gum arabic to give the dried paint a very faint jewel-like sheen.
The colors of the golden eagle's flight feather are not, as the bird's name might suggest, primarily golden — they are a complex subtle interplay of warm brown, dark chocolate, pale buff, and the occasional flash of warm amber at the feather's base where the light catches the inner structure of the barbs at the right angle and reveals the color that gives the bird its name. These colors have been captured with a fidelity and sensitivity that speaks of intimate sustained first-hand observation — an entire winter spent with a collection of golden eagle feathers on the studio table, studying them in different lights, at different times of day, understanding their color as dynamic and responsive rather than fixed, before feeling ready to begin painting. The resulting hand-colored prints are among the most technically refined and emotionally resonant works in the natural history illustration tradition, each one slightly different from the others in the precise chromatic decisions made during the hand-coloring process, making each print in the edition of eighteen subtly and genuinely unique. Three prints from the edition are held in the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum in London, displayed alongside historic Audubon and Gould illustrations as examples of the living continuation of that great tradition.
"Golden Feather Study" is a work in which two great artistic passions are most completely and most beautifully reconciled — the tradition of natural history illustration, with its demand for precise scientific observation and its long distinguished history of images that are simultaneously documents and works of art, and the textile artist's sensibility that understands surface, texture, and the physical properties of materials as themselves expressive, as themselves capable of carrying meaning and feeling independently of any depicted subject. The work depicts a single large flight feather — the primary feather of a golden eagle, one of the most magnificent birds of the Scottish Highland landscape — rendered at life scale against the warm, slightly textured surface of handmade cotton paper.
The feather is drawn in lithographic line with extraordinary precision and confidence — every individual barb of the feather's vane rendered separately, the rachis (the central shaft) drawn with a single continuous line of such authority and sensitivity that it seems to have been made in one breath, the complex transition from the firm flight-functional outer vane to the softer more loosely structured inner vane documented with the exactitude of a scientist and the love of someone who has spent years learning to look at feathers as the masterpieces of evolutionary engineering they are. Over this lithographic foundation, hand-coloring has been applied in thin transparent washes of watercolor mixed with a small amount of gum arabic to give the dried paint a very faint jewel-like sheen.
The colors of the golden eagle's flight feather are not, as the bird's name might suggest, primarily golden — they are a complex subtle interplay of warm brown, dark chocolate, pale buff, and the occasional flash of warm amber at the feather's base where the light catches the inner structure of the barbs at the right angle and reveals the color that gives the bird its name. These colors have been captured with a fidelity and sensitivity that speaks of intimate sustained first-hand observation — an entire winter spent with a collection of golden eagle feathers on the studio table, studying them in different lights, at different times of day, understanding their color as dynamic and responsive rather than fixed, before feeling ready to begin painting. The resulting hand-colored prints are among the most technically refined and emotionally resonant works in the natural history illustration tradition, each one slightly different from the others in the precise chromatic decisions made during the hand-coloring process, making each print in the edition of eighteen subtly and genuinely unique. Three prints from the edition are held in the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum in London, displayed alongside historic Audubon and Gould illustrations as examples of the living continuation of that great tradition.
