If someone said “falcon,” the next word to come to mind probably wouldn’t be “artist.”
Art
An injured kestrel learned to paint and now leads an art class
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But Ferrisburgh, an American kestrel with an injured wing, is headlining art classes in Vermont and drawing crowds with his talented talons.
A couple of paintings done by Ferrisburgh are now being auctioned at a fundraiser online, and the raptor recently showed off his skills at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science.
About four years ago, the young male kestrel was brought to the bird rescue at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science in Quechee, Vt., after he was discovered in the nearby town of Ferrisburgh, a place known for its early art colonies, as well as being a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.
The bird had landed on the shoulder of an unsuspecting person who was out for a walk near his home. The kestrel was loud and chattering away as heperched on the man, and was probably looking to be fed, said Anna Morris, director of on-site and outreach programs at the institute.
“The person who brought him in rightly assumed that this was not normal behavior for a kestrel,” she said.
Morris and her colleagues figured that his willingness to approach humans was because he had been kept illegally in captivity. Vermont law requires a person have a permit, along with proper housing and equipment to keep a falcon.
Employees at the rescue center decided to name the kestrel Ferrisburgh after the town where he was found.
The raptor conducted himself as if he had imprinted on humans as a baby, Morris said, so the bird didn’t know how to behave in the wild, and probably wouldn’t survive there. Workers at the institute thought the kestrel would make an excellent educational flight ambassador.
For several years, Ferrisburgh’s keepers brought him out during field trips and classes so he could fly back and forth and people could get a close-up look at the smallest member of the falcon family.
They also used the little raptor to teach visitors how to help kestrels in the wild by avoiding pesticides and building kestrel nesting boxes to boost population numbers that have declined by about 50 percent since the 1970s.
In June, Ferrisburgh’s role at the bird rescue took a turn when he fractured one of his wings and could no longer fly. Mal Muratori, an environmental educator and family programs director at the institute, found the injured bird on the ground one morning in the kestrel’s enclosure, and said it was unclear how he became hurt.
A veterinarian determined that Ferrisburgh had an old fracture and a new fracture in his right wing, Muratori said, adding that the kestrel had metabolic bone disease probably caused by poor nutrition as a young bird.
“In the wild, 80 percent of Ferrisburgh’s diet would have been insects, supplemented with mice and small birds,” Muratori explained. “But if he was raised in captivity, we have no idea what he might have been fed. His bones were very brittle.”
The kestrel’s keepers wanted to keep him engaged with the public after his injury.
Lexie Smith, an AmeriCorps environmental educator at the institute, had recently watched a friend paint with a crow named Tuck in Tennessee. The crow painted with its beak, using a small sponge that had been dipped into paint. Before coming to the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, Muratori had also watched a crow paint with a brush.
They wondered if Ferrisburgh might also give painting a try as a form of stimulation and exercise.
“I thought it was a cute idea that could also help to educate people about kestrels,” said Smith, 22. “Ferrisburgh could no longer do what he used to do as an ambassador, but maybe he could do art instead.”
She and Muratori said they found an airy space in the building and put down some newspaper and sheets of white paper dabbed with nontoxic blue, teal and pink paint, and then they brought Ferrisburgh out of his enclosure. They used hand signals that he recognized — two fingers tapping on a spot — to get him to run through the paint in exchange for his favorite snack of mealworms.
Soon the bird was running back and forth across the paper, leaving colorful tracks in exchange for treats, Smith said.
She and Muratori saw that Ferrisburgh seemed to enjoy running across paper and canvasses with paint on his talons, so they came up with the idea of having him lead a “Coloring With Kestrels” class.
More than a dozen people paid $10 and showed up for the first class last month, spending an evening coloring pictures with crayons or doing free-form paintings of Ferrisburgh as the raptor created his own artwork at the front of the classroom.
Smith and Muratori placed 14 small white canvases next to each other in a square, then Ferrisburgh walked around through blue, yellow and fuchsia paint. His bright tracks were transferred to the canvas as he scurried around to get his mealworm treats.
“He took to it right away — he was a natural,” Smith said of Ferrisburgh’s class demonstration, which was first reported by USA Today. “Everyone in the class had a lot of fun painting and coloring artworks of Ferrisburgh while he made his own little paintings.”
While Ferrisburgh created his mini action painting, Smith and Muratori gave the class a lesson about kestrels. Another American kestrel, Westford, flew in and went back and forth between the instructors’ thick gloves as they talked about the importance of helping raptors in the wild.
“If you ever find a baby bird outside and you think it needs help, call a wildlife rehabilitator,” said Muratori, 24. “Don’t ever try to raise these birds alone, or they’ll end up like Ferrisburgh. He’s a little bird who think he’s a human.”
As Smith and Muratori figure out if Ferrisburgh is up for leading another class, they are looking into whether some of the institute’s other birds might enjoy making art.
“We’re thinking we’ll try to take up painting with some of them and see what happens,” Smith said, noting that staffers are now training a peregrine falcon named Hawaii to channel his inner artist in the same way as Ferrisburgh.
Instructors had previously tried creating art with one of their Harris’s hawks, but it didn’t work out.
“It was a failure — the hawk loves shredding paper,” Muratori said. “But there are all kinds of art mediums. Maybe we’ll have a poetry event next month and let the birds pick different words.”
Muratori said that could work for Ferrisburgh because he is a vocal and curious bird.
“I think he might also be a natural at that,” Smith added.
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Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia review – Fighting Temeraire sets Tyneside ablaze – The Guardian
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JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire might be the most famous painting in London’s National Gallery and in 2005 was voted The Greatest Painting in Britain, but it’s hardly cool. Its heady atmosphere of patriotic pride and supercharged sentiment is the quintessence of the traditional image the gallery is trying to slough off in its bicentenary year. So while Caravaggio and Van Gogh are at the heart of celebrations in London, The Fighting Temeraire has been, as it were, dragged off by steam tug to be quietly moored on the Tyne.
Yet instead of just borrowing this unfashionable masterpiece, as part of a project entitled National Treasures that has sent 12 NG paintings out and about, Newcastle’s Laing Gallery has built an ambitious and moving exhibition around it.
This lovely show demonstrates precisely why Turner’s 1839 depiction of a ghostly giant of the age of sail being pulled to its final breakup by a newfangled steam tug is just so tearjerkingly evocative of Britain’s past – especially Newcastle’s. In fact, one fascinating find here is a model of a Victorian steam tug built in Newcastle. These low-slung working boats, mounted with a steam engine that drove two paddle wheels, were a Tyneside speciality – it was the Tyne-built steam tugs, London and the Samson, that pulled HMS Temeraire to the breaker’s yard.
Now the steam tugs too belong to a rusting past, as does so much of the north-east’s shipbuilding industry. The show includes powerful black-and-white photographs by Chris Killip of the last days of Tyneside supertanker-building in the 1970s. In one, children play on a terraced street corner, dwarfed by a half-built tanker looming in fog; in another, workers look tiny below the monster propeller of the ship they’re building. By 1979, this Tyne industry would vanish. “I didn’t know at the time that it was going to end as quickly as it did,” a wall text quotes him as saying.
This north-eastern perspective puts the nostalgia of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in a smoky new light. It also makes visual sense. The sublime disparities in scale in Killip’s photographs capture, just as they mourn, the great industrial yards and their massive creations, all taking you straight back to Turner. The show includes the artist’s mighty 1818 watercolour A First Rate Taking on Stores, which depicts a colossal Royal Navy ship surrounded by smaller boats. Turner dwells on the fortress-like immensity of its gun-studded side, which makes the little boats seem like toys. Looking at this, you see why the navy in this era was said to defend Britain with “wooden walls”.
What’s incredible is how Turner can communicate the stateliness of this nautical behemoth in watercolours on a little sheet of paper. His genius can be baffling. He knows the way water moves and how clouds flow with such intimacy he can unleash their forces like a magician controlling the weather. In an early sketch of Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, he adds fishing boats caught in a swirling channel against the castle’s seaside cliffs.
Turner also acknowledged the horror in the battle of Trafalgar. His awesome oil sketch of the 1805 confrontation – in which Nelson led his ships straight into the French fleet in a gory, foolhardy triumph that destroyed Napoleon’s pretensions to sea power – concentrates on the men, British as well as French, trying to survive in the sea after losing their ships. Behind them, the battle is a confusion of smoke and sails. Who’s winning? Is anyone?
The Temeraire fought alongside Nelson’s HMS Victory. Built at Chatham dockyard in Kent from more than 5,000 oak trees, it served in the Napoleonic wars and was specially praised for its actions at Trafalgar. A detailed 1805 model of the Temeraire is on show, laboriously made from animal bone by French prisoners. The Victory is preserved as a national monument, while the Temeraire’s fighting days were forgotten and it was used as a floating barracks on the Thames for naval recruits. By 1838, it was time to drag the old hulk to be scrapped.
It all leaves you primed to look at Turner’s painting of this vessel as never before. A pale ghost ship can be seen towering in the evening light, already vanishing, its richly wrought prow a wonder from a lost age. Such ships existed, Turner is saying, as did the people who sailed and fought on them. But here now is the cheeky, brash, steam-driven tug whose paddles chop the water into spuming waves. The river is spookily still, a burnished mirror for a sun that’s determined to give the Temeraire an appropriate sendoff, with rays exploding in a twilight display of crimson, gold and scarlet. It’s fire in the sky that echoes the long-silenced guns of Trafalgar.
Patriotic? Sentimental? Hell yeah. But The Fighting Temeraire is really a painting about what it is to be outmoded in an ever-changing industrial world – for a sailing ship, a 1970s shipyard worker, or indeed an artist. Like the Temeraire, Turner saw impossible changes in his lifetime. He witnessed the Industrial Revolution, saw sail give way to steam and even caught the birth of photography. A letter from him is on display in which he refuses to lend the work – let alone sell it – “for any price”. The mysterious intensity of The Fighting Temeraire and his attachment to it come from his identification with the doomed ship.
Turner kept this painting with him until he died and left it to the National Gallery. This fine exhibition frees a great work from cliche by taking a national anthem and turning it into a Springsteen rustbelt ballad.
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Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia review – Fighting Temeraire sets Tyneside ablaze – The Guardian
[ad_1]
JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire might be the most famous painting in London’s National Gallery and in 2005 was voted The Greatest Painting in Britain, but it’s hardly cool. Its heady atmosphere of patriotic pride and supercharged sentiment is the quintessence of the traditional image the gallery is trying to slough off in its bicentenary year. So while Caravaggio and Van Gogh are at the heart of celebrations in London, The Fighting Temeraire has been, as it were, dragged off by steam tug to be quietly moored on the Tyne.
Yet instead of just borrowing this unfashionable masterpiece, as part of a project entitled National Treasures that has sent 12 NG paintings out and about, Newcastle’s Laing Gallery has built an ambitious and moving exhibition around it.
This lovely show demonstrates precisely why Turner’s 1839 depiction of a ghostly giant of the age of sail being pulled to its final breakup by a newfangled steam tug is just so tearjerkingly evocative of Britain’s past – especially Newcastle’s. In fact, one fascinating find here is a model of a Victorian steam tug built in Newcastle. These low-slung working boats, mounted with a steam engine that drove two paddle wheels, were a Tyneside speciality – it was the Tyne-built steam tugs, London and the Samson, that pulled HMS Temeraire to the breaker’s yard.
Now the steam tugs too belong to a rusting past, as does so much of the north-east’s shipbuilding industry. The show includes powerful black-and-white photographs by Chris Killip of the last days of Tyneside supertanker-building in the 1970s. In one, children play on a terraced street corner, dwarfed by a half-built tanker looming in fog; in another, workers look tiny below the monster propeller of the ship they’re building. By 1979, this Tyne industry would vanish. “I didn’t know at the time that it was going to end as quickly as it did,” a wall text quotes him as saying.
This north-eastern perspective puts the nostalgia of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in a smoky new light. It also makes visual sense. The sublime disparities in scale in Killip’s photographs capture, just as they mourn, the great industrial yards and their massive creations, all taking you straight back to Turner. The show includes the artist’s mighty 1818 watercolour A First Rate Taking on Stores, which depicts a colossal Royal Navy ship surrounded by smaller boats. Turner dwells on the fortress-like immensity of its gun-studded side, which makes the little boats seem like toys. Looking at this, you see why the navy in this era was said to defend Britain with “wooden walls”.
What’s incredible is how Turner can communicate the stateliness of this nautical behemoth in watercolours on a little sheet of paper. His genius can be baffling. He knows the way water moves and how clouds flow with such intimacy he can unleash their forces like a magician controlling the weather. In an early sketch of Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, he adds fishing boats caught in a swirling channel against the castle’s seaside cliffs.
Turner also acknowledged the horror in the battle of Trafalgar. His awesome oil sketch of the 1805 confrontation – in which Nelson led his ships straight into the French fleet in a gory, foolhardy triumph that destroyed Napoleon’s pretensions to sea power – concentrates on the men, British as well as French, trying to survive in the sea after losing their ships. Behind them, the battle is a confusion of smoke and sails. Who’s winning? Is anyone?
The Temeraire fought alongside Nelson’s HMS Victory. Built at Chatham dockyard in Kent from more than 5,000 oak trees, it served in the Napoleonic wars and was specially praised for its actions at Trafalgar. A detailed 1805 model of the Temeraire is on show, laboriously made from animal bone by French prisoners. The Victory is preserved as a national monument, while the Temeraire’s fighting days were forgotten and it was used as a floating barracks on the Thames for naval recruits. By 1838, it was time to drag the old hulk to be scrapped.
It all leaves you primed to look at Turner’s painting of this vessel as never before. A pale ghost ship can be seen towering in the evening light, already vanishing, its richly wrought prow a wonder from a lost age. Such ships existed, Turner is saying, as did the people who sailed and fought on them. But here now is the cheeky, brash, steam-driven tug whose paddles chop the water into spuming waves. The river is spookily still, a burnished mirror for a sun that’s determined to give the Temeraire an appropriate sendoff, with rays exploding in a twilight display of crimson, gold and scarlet. It’s fire in the sky that echoes the long-silenced guns of Trafalgar.
Patriotic? Sentimental? Hell yeah. But The Fighting Temeraire is really a painting about what it is to be outmoded in an ever-changing industrial world – for a sailing ship, a 1970s shipyard worker, or indeed an artist. Like the Temeraire, Turner saw impossible changes in his lifetime. He witnessed the Industrial Revolution, saw sail give way to steam and even caught the birth of photography. A letter from him is on display in which he refuses to lend the work – let alone sell it – “for any price”. The mysterious intensity of The Fighting Temeraire and his attachment to it come from his identification with the doomed ship.
Turner kept this painting with him until he died and left it to the National Gallery. This fine exhibition frees a great work from cliche by taking a national anthem and turning it into a Springsteen rustbelt ballad.
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Art
Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia review – Fighting Temeraire sets Tyneside ablaze – The Guardian
[ad_1]
JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire might be the most famous painting in London’s National Gallery and in 2005 was voted The Greatest Painting in Britain, but it’s hardly cool. Its heady atmosphere of patriotic pride and supercharged sentiment is the quintessence of the traditional image the gallery is trying to slough off in its bicentenary year. So while Caravaggio and Van Gogh are at the heart of celebrations in London, The Fighting Temeraire has been, as it were, dragged off by steam tug to be quietly moored on the Tyne.
Yet instead of just borrowing this unfashionable masterpiece, as part of a project entitled National Treasures that has sent 12 NG paintings out and about, Newcastle’s Laing Gallery has built an ambitious and moving exhibition around it.
This lovely show demonstrates precisely why Turner’s 1839 depiction of a ghostly giant of the age of sail being pulled to its final breakup by a newfangled steam tug is just so tearjerkingly evocative of Britain’s past – especially Newcastle’s. In fact, one fascinating find here is a model of a Victorian steam tug built in Newcastle. These low-slung working boats, mounted with a steam engine that drove two paddle wheels, were a Tyneside speciality – it was the Tyne-built steam tugs, London and the Samson, that pulled HMS Temeraire to the breaker’s yard.
Now the steam tugs too belong to a rusting past, as does so much of the north-east’s shipbuilding industry. The show includes powerful black-and-white photographs by Chris Killip of the last days of Tyneside supertanker-building in the 1970s. In one, children play on a terraced street corner, dwarfed by a half-built tanker looming in fog; in another, workers look tiny below the monster propeller of the ship they’re building. By 1979, this Tyne industry would vanish. “I didn’t know at the time that it was going to end as quickly as it did,” a wall text quotes him as saying.
This north-eastern perspective puts the nostalgia of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in a smoky new light. It also makes visual sense. The sublime disparities in scale in Killip’s photographs capture, just as they mourn, the great industrial yards and their massive creations, all taking you straight back to Turner. The show includes the artist’s mighty 1818 watercolour A First Rate Taking on Stores, which depicts a colossal Royal Navy ship surrounded by smaller boats. Turner dwells on the fortress-like immensity of its gun-studded side, which makes the little boats seem like toys. Looking at this, you see why the navy in this era was said to defend Britain with “wooden walls”.
What’s incredible is how Turner can communicate the stateliness of this nautical behemoth in watercolours on a little sheet of paper. His genius can be baffling. He knows the way water moves and how clouds flow with such intimacy he can unleash their forces like a magician controlling the weather. In an early sketch of Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, he adds fishing boats caught in a swirling channel against the castle’s seaside cliffs.
Turner also acknowledged the horror in the battle of Trafalgar. His awesome oil sketch of the 1805 confrontation – in which Nelson led his ships straight into the French fleet in a gory, foolhardy triumph that destroyed Napoleon’s pretensions to sea power – concentrates on the men, British as well as French, trying to survive in the sea after losing their ships. Behind them, the battle is a confusion of smoke and sails. Who’s winning? Is anyone?
The Temeraire fought alongside Nelson’s HMS Victory. Built at Chatham dockyard in Kent from more than 5,000 oak trees, it served in the Napoleonic wars and was specially praised for its actions at Trafalgar. A detailed 1805 model of the Temeraire is on show, laboriously made from animal bone by French prisoners. The Victory is preserved as a national monument, while the Temeraire’s fighting days were forgotten and it was used as a floating barracks on the Thames for naval recruits. By 1838, it was time to drag the old hulk to be scrapped.
It all leaves you primed to look at Turner’s painting of this vessel as never before. A pale ghost ship can be seen towering in the evening light, already vanishing, its richly wrought prow a wonder from a lost age. Such ships existed, Turner is saying, as did the people who sailed and fought on them. But here now is the cheeky, brash, steam-driven tug whose paddles chop the water into spuming waves. The river is spookily still, a burnished mirror for a sun that’s determined to give the Temeraire an appropriate sendoff, with rays exploding in a twilight display of crimson, gold and scarlet. It’s fire in the sky that echoes the long-silenced guns of Trafalgar.
Patriotic? Sentimental? Hell yeah. But The Fighting Temeraire is really a painting about what it is to be outmoded in an ever-changing industrial world – for a sailing ship, a 1970s shipyard worker, or indeed an artist. Like the Temeraire, Turner saw impossible changes in his lifetime. He witnessed the Industrial Revolution, saw sail give way to steam and even caught the birth of photography. A letter from him is on display in which he refuses to lend the work – let alone sell it – “for any price”. The mysterious intensity of The Fighting Temeraire and his attachment to it come from his identification with the doomed ship.
Turner kept this painting with him until he died and left it to the National Gallery. This fine exhibition frees a great work from cliche by taking a national anthem and turning it into a Springsteen rustbelt ballad.
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