It's Archival Works Friday – so soon??!!
As
I mentioned before - I'll post a painting, drawing or serigraph
(silkscreen prints) from the "archive" files of years past...and give a
little back story on the work - the first Friday of the month.
I am now including photographs of past years. I hope you'll find it interesting!
I
know I've gotten into this topic before with 'some' of you; it is
something I relive occasionally when someone poses the question where I
started; where it all began I guess.
First
it was just unintentional small steps...parents who didn't protest
about the little things...frogs, toads and turtles "free ranging" in the
basement; keeping a Brown Bat in a bird cage on the front porch;
science summer school; teaching the neighborhood squirrels to eat out of
my hand; wading and fishing in neighborhood streams.
(OK...the bat in the cage didn't go over well but we kept it for a
couple days anyway.)
I
gained an appreciation for the beauty of this scheme of things. I was
fascinated by the light shimmering off the membrane of an amphibian, the
colors and design of a turtle's carapace and plastron, the shapes of
trees, their leaves, the hillsides along the Des Moines River valley,
the rocks and fossils along the favorite stream of my youth - Lizard
Creek, or lying on a pasture hillside staring at the sky...watching
clouds and the birds that intersected my field of view.
One
day, after saving for weeks, I bought a book..over $12 - a lot of money
back then for a kid! I was eleven or twelve; the book was full of
color illustrations by Louis Aggassiz Fuertes. They were awesome,
beautiful...the slip cover of this 1937 edition book, for the lack of a
better word, transported me. On the front cover were two of my most
favorite birds, a Cooper's and a Red-tailed Hawk - perched on treetop
branches above forested hillsides. The landscape and the birds were
mesmerizing for a young impressionable me. I wanted to paint birds.
Birds
in the yard would never seem to hold still long enough for me to draw; I
got the idea I needed to photograph them, and then I could draw them
from their photo; brilliant idea I thought. After all, Audubon drew and
painted from his birds after shooting them – this would be less messy!
I
didn't have a camera, but my mother loaned me her old box camera. Ya,
the old Ansco Shur-Shot Jr. at the top of this post, was to be my first
camera. I actually took quite a few pictures with this Ansco...all
B&W...it was a 120 film camera (2 1/4X2 3/4" or 6X7cm). You can kind
of guess how useful it was as a bird camera though - not very.
One
incident convinced me to get a "suitable" camera. I was walking the
upper banks along Lizard Creek's south branch west of town (Ft Dodge,
IA) one summer afternoon. It was a typical hot and humid day and the
afternoon wasn't the best condition to find birds. By just dumb luck I
came upon a Great Horned Owl sitting in a tree jutting out of the high
bank below me. The bird was maybe 3 - 4 feet out from the bank on a
branch about 8 - 10 feet above the water flowing beneath it. The bird
was awake, looking across the creek into the woodland there. I dropped
as fast as I could into the grass above the high bank and crawled very
slowly on my stomach to the bank's edge and peered over - it hadn't seen
or heard me, the noise of the creek had masked my presence. My heart
was pounding so loud I was sure the bird would hear it!
The
owl was sitting in deep shade. I pushed the box camera ahead of me and
tried peering into the viewfinder without raising my head too much and
giving myself away. I was no more than 6-8 feet away from the bird, yet I
could not find the owl in my viewfinder; the old box camera's
viewfinder just was not bright enough. I looked up again and tried to
reference where the bird was, then looked back into the viewfinder -
still no bird, I looked up again and the owl was no where...it was
gone.
 |
My first SLR 35mm camera in 1963
|
Whether
the bird spotted or heard me I really don't know, what I do remember is
the rush from the experience and the needling anguish of blowing it!
That was not going to happen again! I spent the next year saving money
from about any odd job I could find, (mainly my paper route) and bought
myself an East German 'Praktica IV' SLR and a 400mm lens. As best I can
recollect, this was in 1963.
 |
My
first bird photo with my Praktica SLR in 1964 (White-breasted Nuthatch)
on Kodachrome slide film with a Kowa 400mm lens and a bellows
attachment for a closer focus range.
|
|
I
became hooked on nature photography that way...birds eventually led to
all flora and fauna and to the landscape. Painting nature eventually led
the same direction.
I don't know why I didn't become an ornithologist, biologist or
botanist? There was always an urge to paint, draw or photograph and
that's all I can say.
We all gotta start somewhere!
