Early Influences: Introduction

While most people disagree with me, I don’t believe we are as possessed of free will as we like to think. It is not, I believe, that we can’t make choices, but that some choices reflect who we inherently are from birth, with each of us responding differently to what we encounter. I remember hearing a musicologist recall how, as a kid his imagination was fired up when, as one of hundreds of school kids at a concert, he first heard Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. However much his peers did or did not enjoy it, none was as impassioned about as was he, and he made music his career, thereafter. We hear that kind of story often, the “natural talent” that fought through to establish outstanding careers against statistical odds, as if pre-ordained not supernaturally, but by some genetic predilection.

My earliest memories, from age three, (in my grandparents’ house in Agincourt, that they moved away from before I was four) included being with my grandfather as we looked at sparrows (they may have been juncos) in the snow outside the front window, and of coloring in a picture of a rabbit in a child’s coloring book. It was the next year that, using wax crayons I drew an image that could be identified as a kingfisher on the back of a bed tray that my parents subsequently kept and cherished for many years.  I was definitely not much of a child prodigy, not so much gifted with the ability to draw (I have seen realistic art by kids much better than what I could do at the same age) as I was possessed with a fervent desire to draw, connected with a passion for birds, for animals, for nature and science.  It all co-mingled in an intense, obsessive, interest in bird and other so-called wildlife art. To the degree that I possess proficiency, it has far more to do with practice driven by compulsion than any innate artistic talent.  There was a major exhibit of wild animal art in the Royal Ontario Museum in the late fall of 1975, which, although the organizer knew and was mentoring me, I was not invited to contribute to; I was not ready, a decision I agreed with, although the exhibit itself fired my imagination, and was the first, and in some cases last, time I saw original work of many of my bird and nature art heroes.

Certainly, I was drawn to the bird art and illustrations done by many artists. In those days bird photographs of all but the most common species were relatively rarely published, and often of poor quality.  While nature photography interested me, and still does, it was the way in which artists illustrated birds that held me spellbound.  There was a fraction of the number of books about birds that now exist, and I sought them out eagerly, although my parents’ budget was modest at best. The Toronto Telegram, a long defunct newspaper, ran a more or less weekly feature that included a full-page reproduction of a painting of some species of native bird, with a brief write-up. And at the same time a local paper company produced calendars featuring reproductions of paintings of birds, and I eagerly sought out each one.  I owned every illustrated book on birds my parents’ modest income could provide.  I ordered the bird cards published by the National Audubon Society and belonged to their junior naturalists’ club, the only class club I ever presided over as president. For a brief, pre-adolescent period of time I did not quite comprehend that my passion was not widely shared and that bird artists were not as well known and popular among the public as entertainers or sports stars. I thought, however briefly, that Roger Tory Peterson must be at a level of name recognition on a plateau that was more or less at the same as Mickey Mantel or Bing Crosby. 

I soon enough learned otherwise, of course, but that did not dampen my own ardor, as I struggled through successions of various artistic media – wax crayons, colored pencils, oils, watercolors, caseins, and the very early version of acrylics that smelled of plastic and came in jars that grew florets of fungus and coated the painting surface with a layer that, when dry, could be peeled off, to produce not so much a great masterpiece as a bird painting that could hold its own with my heroes, always failing to do so.

Never, ever, did I think of it as some sort of “competition”.  If I had any measurement between “better” or “worse”, it was with regard what might be called ornithological integrity, and even that was tempered by the challenge and limitations of the medium.  In childhood it was simple, there was a certain color, form, behavior and so on, and the artist had to draw that, whatever the subject.  However slowly I began to understand how much more there is to it all than that.  There were so relatively few bird artists whose work, through reproductions in books and other publications, were available to me that I could identify who painted virtually every bird painting by their individual style.  Of course, I was interested in paintings of non-avian wildlife, and indeed, art generally. I toyed a lot with cartooning, with fantasy art, with various landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, whatever.  But I was always drawn to animals generally, and birds particularly.  In the early, formative days there was a fairly restricted range of bird artists, virtually all men and virtually all Eurocentric in ethnic origin. Without seeing the signature I could identify the creator of virtually every bird painting I saw reproduced by the “style” of it.

It is different now, and with the advent of digital photography, often copied in part or in whole, and with the art supply industry providing a huge number of ways to produce clever visual effects, up to and including computer imaging.  The shelves of bookstores and websites of online book sellers and publishers are filled with lavishly illustrated books on birds from every corner of the globe, or the ever-shifting taxonomic spectrum, and no longer can the works of the artists who came before me be enjoyed for their singularity, there on the meeting place between art, science, realism, and impressionism.  Now elderly, I consider myself a throwback to those earlier artists; they are all that I wanted to be or want to be.  Here are my impressions of them, honed through decades of my own development, self-education, experience, and reflection.  I owe them this effort.  I am happy to pay.