T.M. Shortt (1911 – 1986)

While I was born too late to know the great Brooks or Fuertes, there was one bird portrayer in their class who I did to know, a hero who became a mentor.  Terence Michael Shortt worked at the Royal Ontario Museum, as an ornithologist and an artist, becoming head of Biology Display in 1948.  I think I was about eight when I first was taken by my mom to meet him, shortly after that promotion.  My mother used to say that at the time I was so young that when I sat in a wooden chair in his office my feet did not touch the floor.  At the time Terry was working on the scratchboard line drawings for L.L. Snyder’s book, Arctic Birds of Canada, to be published by the University of Toronto Press in 1957.  Snyder was the department head, gruff and pedantic but tolerant of this bird-crazy young boy who, in the years that followed, could so often be found wandering around in the ornithology department.  Terry had a framed print on his wall of Fuertes’ painting of a Helmet Shrike from the Ethiopian expedition, and later told me he had packed his bag to go and visit Fuertes in August, 1927 when news came of the tragedy, so never got to meet him.

Terry’s scratchboard drawings had already been published in 1954 in Fred Bodsworth’s brilliantly written novelette, Last of the Curlews.  And between them the two sets of scratchboard artwork show the breadth of Terry Shortt’s artistic genius, the first ones so complimentary to Bodsworth’s literary skills, the later ones more formerly showing what every person ornithologically inclined likes to see – a solidly accurate rendering of form and pattern.  Not incidentally, Fred himself was among the people of that era who also would qualify as a mentor, encouraging me in my art and my interest in birds and nature.

The drawings for Snyder’s book (Terry was working on the Peregrine Falcon in his office when we first met) put birds in high arctic backgrounds posed to show markings and identifying features, yes, but also in extremely natural poses. In the earlier work illustrating a work of fiction, the black and white drawings were more dramatic, showing birds flying low at night over ocean waves, huddled on a ledge during a blizzard, flying overhead or, upon encountering a mate, cuddled together. Scratchboard of that era was thin cardboard coated with a very thin layer of crisply white clay.  Black India ink would be applied, and then with various tools, parts were scratched away to reveal the white underneath.  It was painstaking work and Terry “worked small” with an incredibly steady hand.  He innovatively used sponges, and an ink-soaked toothbrush raked over a screen to produce special effects that suggested textures of rocks and lichens.  Although the office was small, there was a miniature jury-rigged drafting board by the window, to the side of Terry’s desk, on top of which was the scapula of a sealion, somehow treated against heat, which Terry and my mom shared as an ash tray. 

He urged me to try scratchboard, of course, but I never was very good at it, preferring straight up pen and ink with stippling or hatch work. Terry often used a radiograph pen, which I was too impatient to master as it always seemed to be clogging up and needing to be cleaned.  For him the results were the ability to do the finest of lines and some of his work thus failed to reproduce well with the technology then available. To this day I prefer to use what is called a crow quill nib, which Terry could also use with virtuoso expertise.

But I should also mention another book, Flashing Wings, by Richard M. Saunders (who I was also was privileged to know, if not terribly well), published in 1947. It consisted of birders’ diary notes through the course of the various months of the year, although different years, in and around the Toronto region. Terry had illustrated it with both conventional pen and ink drawings and graphite pencil drawings. The work was astounding in its evocation of birds, often little vignettes, or full-page drawings, such as his flock of scaup on the waters along the Lake Ontario shoreline, showing perfect mastery of perspective as the figures are reduced in size going away from those in front, all beautifully drawn, the shoreline looking very much in the distance, or his drawing of a Whip-poor-will on a branch up in a tree at twilight, an image I still find to be singularly haunting in its evocations of the mysteries of the night.

Terry illustrated quite a few bird books in black and white, some in color, and had his work published elsewhere, including by what was then called (as I recall) Carlings Nature Club, essentially a conservation organization funded by Carlings, the beer company.  One set of plates that I found enchanting (and still do) appears in the book, Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America, published at the beginning of 1943, while I was, in fact, only a fetus, to be born six months later, and Brooks was still alive and, in fact, doing some of his best work.  For the Kortright book Terry portrayed all the species of ducks, geese and swans then known to occur regularly in North America, and, from the gossip I was to hear less than a decade later, did much of the drafting of the text, fully credited to author Francis Kortright.  The plates were clearly illustrative, showing a typically marked individual of the various plumages of each species, including birds in molt, males in the summer “eclipse” plumage, and even downy young hatchlings. 

But never did that distinction, which you’ll see me refer to many times on this website, that the fine art community tends to make between mere “illustration” and true blue fine “art”, more disturb me than when Terry told me the story of the originals (which I wanted, of course, to see).  They no longer existed. Someone (I was not told who) had left them behind at a bus or train depot and they were never found.  “You see,” explained Terry, “the plates for the book had already been made, so back then originals used to make illustrations, once used, were not thought to have any real value or purpose.”  Some, very few, of the details of the birds were not quite correct, as to be expected in such an expansive undertaking (the young Trumpeter Swan’s beak color is incorrect) so early in the history of birding, ornithology and photography but if these are illustrations, they are a bravura example of art meeting science meeting the need of those who want the information that they convey.  And, of course, Terry’s skills kept improving through is career. 

Terry’s influence was not just inspirational, but direct and pragmatic. He would look at my attempted art and make suggestions, always wise.  Don’t draw the bottom of the swimming duck or grebe where it meets the water, draw the water where it meets the bird; darken the shadow more as you get away from the light source, but bring in counter lighting that is reflected by the environment against the edge of the bird; change the shading on twigs as they, themselves, change direction; be careful about the distance between base of beak and front edge of the eye, always distorted in reference specimens; try drawing the spaces that separate the leaves, rather than the leaves, and so on, along with discussions about how to show a flying bird’s wings that are beating so fast it is not possible for the human eye to see – do you show a blur, or freeze the wings like a strobe-lit photograph, or something in between? And above all else he taught me the subjectivity of color, something I think many young artists find hard to learn. 

We’d talk, too, about the work of other artists, and Terry, while magnanimous, always pointed out how or where improvements could be made.  He would discard his own work if it didn’t satisfy him. Jim Ballie told me of retrieving a lovely drawing of a White-crowned Sparrow by Terry from a waste paper basket.

On that first visit Terry changed my life in a way I could not have predicted.  A night or two earlier my mom had taken me to a film put on by the museum that featured the ornithology department’s expedition to northern Ontario, and it showed him and others as part of a museum expedition to far northern Ontario. Someone in the film raised a shotgun and brought down a shorebird, if memory serves, a Hudsonian Godwit. Then Terry was shown painting the bird’s head and foot, recording the colors of the un-feathered portions before they faded.  This was, of course, long before I learned that was a common practice among bird artists of the era, long before I had seen reproductions of such work by other artists such as Fuertes and George M. Sutton.  That was all to come, and meanwhile, I was shocked at the idea of killing a bird.

Terry provided the usual rationales, that the birds thus sacrificed served the interest of both science and art, that predation was natural and suffering inherent to simply being alive, all of which even at that age, I knew to be true.  He used the analogy of the robin eating the worm; whatever else, if neurologically well enough developed to feel pain, the worm suffered, and its writhing struggles would seem to so demonstrate. And we all ate meat, wore leather, didn’t we?  Of course. 

Then he took us to a place I would eventually come to know well, the bird room, and past that, “the collection”, which consisted of rows of cabinets, all fronted by metal doors. The slightly acrid scent of dichlozoline, a small very similar to the disinfectant sometimes placed in men’s urinals, permeated the air, subtly blended by the odor of pipe and cigarette smoke, with a faint trace of floor polish.  This was very much behind the scenes, and I felt a great sense of privilege, innocent of any clue as to what was about to transpire.

Terry stopped at a cabinet. I noticed that it, like all the others, had a label on the front.  This one said Paradisaeidae across the top, followed by a list of what, even at that age, I recognized as scientific names, although quite unfamiliar.  The doors, latched top, bottom, and middle, “to keep them insect proof” were opened, and the sweetly acrid smell of the pesticide intensified, for which Terry apologized.  Stacked from top to bottom were a series of uniform trays of pale colored wood, slid into slots in the wooden sides of the metal cabinet’s interior.  My brain could not process whatever was inside…something…strange. 

A tray was pulled out, and there, in neat rows, were strangely stuffed birds, flat on their backs, feet crossed, white cotton for eyes, and various types of labels tied to their somewhat shriveled feet. They were called study skins, Terry explained, and preserved in such manner so that ornithologists could examine them, or at least the features of their plumage as it was on them at the time of death.  And what birds they were, not merely brightly colored but some feathered in the deepest black plumage I could image, with patches of brilliantly iridescent feathers that changed color as they were turned relative to the light source, and odd long plumes.  They were birds of paradise, most “collected”, the term that was used for the practice of killing and preserving these specimens, in the previous century.

We moved to other cabinets, some filled with small numbers of various exotic species from around the world, others with much larger numbers of native species – row upon neat row of American Robins, Wood Thrushes, Eastern Bluebirds – why so many?  As every museum ornithologist has surely done at one time or another it was explained that no two birds were alike, and through the life stages of each species there might be many different plumages, as well as well as considerable individual variation, not to mention geographic variation. Robins from Labrador had blacker backs than those from Ontario, while the ones from Nevada were quite pale.  Each bird had a label that, ideally, at a minimum gave the scientific name of the species (written in pencil because names change), the date and place that it was collected, the name of the person who collected it, whether it was an adult or immature and, as confirmed by dissection, whether it was male or female, the sex indicated by the characters ♂ for male and ♀ for female. Some had more data, like weight and measurements, perhaps stomach contents, colors of eyes or beak or feet, and so on. But what was most exciting to me was that I could pick up each specimen with care and literally see not the bird as it would be in life, no, but at least the details of feathering, plumage color and get a sense of patterns.  The un-feathered parts had indeed lost their natural color, and beaks and feet had shrunk a little but with an understanding of what the bird was like in life, Terry explained. The serious artist could do detailed, lifelike paintings using the specimens, and any other references available, such as sketches and photographs, and, of course, memory and knowledge of the subjects’ habits.

That night I feverishly dreamt of cotton-eyed birds from strange and distant places, rows of them, there for the artist to use because while Terry certainly made it clear that the first priority of preserving such specimens was in the service of science, they were also indispensable to the serious bird artist.  Thus began a life-long relationship between me and the Royal Ontario Museum.  I still would sit on a stool out in the public galleries, and sketch the mounted birds on display in showcases under glass, but then I could go into the private area and examine the actual skins of such birds and in time, borrow them, and eventually learn to prepare my own specimens.  I obtained the requisite scientific collector’s permit from the Canadian Wildlife Service and learned my way around a shotgun.

There was only one problem; I did not like to kill anything, and so for my own collection I began to scour sources for birds already dead, eventually putting away the shotgun, forever, and also stopping my consumption of meat and steadily reassessing human-animal relationship, but that is a different story. 

To T.M. Shortt I owed much, but the one advice that I may have valued the most was to not try to earn a full living as a bird artist. I slowly came to realize that the reason was simple; unless my choice of subject and style always meshed with public taste, I would forever be constrained in such choices to bow to buyer demand.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to have more freedom, and also, I wanted to do more, in other areas, to protect birds and other animals, to help the environment, but that is all another story. In being tutored by T.M. Shortt, I was taught by the best.