Bird Book of Hours, 2018 - 2024
Bird Book of Hours
I began this book after returning from Belgium in 2018, where I had been studying carnival culture and the work of James Ensor under a Fulbright Scholarship. I’ve always enjoyed the different sizes and quality of European paper, so I purchased this blank book in Brussels, thinking it was a portfolio of loose papers. It was only when I got it home that I realized it was a bound book. I immediately felt obligated to utilize it as such.
Later that summer of 2018, I took it with me to Mountain Lake Biological Station in Giles County, Virginia. I have been leading an artist residency there since 2010 with my colleague, Amy Chan, and it was my turn to head the residency that year. Each time I had visited MLBS over the 14 years span of residencies; I would create with their bird specimen collection. In 2018, I began painting my Bird Book of Hours.
The MLBS bird collection is a hundred years old. Snuggly situated in a large flat file cabinet, one need only pull out the large, flat drawers to see hundreds of taxidermized birds. The smell of moth balls is strong, and the birds must be handled with surgical gloves to avoid the poisons used to preserve them a hundred years ago. One can carefully pick up a flicker or a wren and read the small, handwritten identification tag in fountain pen ink tied to their little feet; “Falls Church, VA, 1896.”
Whichever bird I choose to paint that day is careful placed under a large glass bell jar for observation. As a painter, I try to bring life back into the mummified birds. Working wet into wet, I endeavor to push the pigmented puddles of paint into a free-flowing form, like the once effortless flights of these ghost birds.
The Bird Book of Hours moves from morning to night, marking out the progressive hours of light in a day. All the pages were derived from my time at Mountain Lake, except for the ninth page. The Twilight with Loons painting was created at Skowhegan, Maine in 2021 during the pandemic, as MLBS was closed for 2 years during that time.
Megan Marlatt
1 September 2024