"Ukraine, Forget Me Not"

Field Guide : Eurasian Blue Tit appears in mm and words "Ukraine, Forget Me Not," a limited edition zine created to raise funds for Ukraine Aid Operations. Printed in Denmark, the zine is available at bookstores in London, Milan, and Rome.

Artist and curator Lorenza Galeone asked if I knew of a bird sporting Ukraine's national colors. I initially thought only of tropical bird species, but I wanted to find a geographically-appropriate representative. Enter the Eurasian blue tit. This plucky passerine occurs commonly throughout continental Europe, with a range that extends into Ukraine and western Russia.

"The Pigeon Show"

My rock dove (a.k.a., pigeon) Field Guide color column poster will be in The Pigeon Show, on view at Fayes Video Bench Gallery (San Francisco) August 1 – September 10, 2022. Many thanks to the wonderful Michael McConnell for inviting me to join the art flock.

"Field Guide" In BirdWatching Magazine

The February 2022 issue of BirdWatching just landed on shelves and I’m delighted to see my Field Guide series featured in the magazine’s “On The Wire” section.

Added bonus: the blurb about my project runs just underneath a segment about a new birding podcast, Life List, which is co-hosted by family friend and birding world superstar, George Armistead, along with Bay Area-based Alvaro Jaramillo and West Virginian Mollee Brown. If you’re a bird nerd like me, I think you’ll enjoy the conversations – give it a listen!

“An Artist's Approach To Avian Taxonomy"

The Golden Gate Audubon Society blog ran a short essay of mine this week. “Field Guide: An Artist’s Approach To Avian Taxonomy” provides a little more backstory about my Field Guide project.

In the days’ interstitial spaces, I started turning over an unrealized idea I’d jotted down in a sketchbook years ago – “create bird species paint chips.” There was a germ of something exciting there, but what?

It also includes more detail about the process of creating each Field Guide poster. If you’re interested in learning more, click on through.

Also, if you’re a bird nerd based in the San Francisco Bay Area, I also encourage you to learn more about Golden Gate Audubon and to consider supporting their work.

“Rooted In Relationship”

On Wednesday, September 8, I presented a webinar for the Mount Diablo Interpretive Association. Rooted In Relationship surveyed two decades of my art, illustration, and design projects with a focus on the through lines – my fascination with the relationship between human and nonhuman animals and my conviction that each of us urgently needs to cultivate a sense of place (if we’re to be responsible stewards). I’m honored that the MDIA invited me to present.

If you’re interested in viewing the webinar, you can find a recording of it here. I also encourage you to check out some of the other talks archived on the MDIA events page.

"Field Guide" Poster Prints Available!

I’m thrilled to announce that Field Guide posters are available for purchase in my print shop!

Each handsome poster print features rich, appealing colors on archival, acid-free matte paper. At launch, there are posters featuring seventeen different species; I plan to add another species each week. If you have a special request, please let me know!

Per my charitable sales model, whenever a Field Guide poster is purchased, a contribution equal to 10% of the print’s cost is made to a nonprofit working to tackle environmental or social challenges.

What is the Field Guide poster project all about? As a natural history nerd, I often think about how we humans classify and catalog life. The social implications of our evolved human impulse to categorize are generally grim, but the same proclivity allows us to better appreciate evolution and the relationship between species, subspecies, and ecological races (or ecotypes).

For the Field Guide project, I consider birds from one angle – literally, birds viewed in profile. I then breakdown each bird by color (plumage, legs, beaks/bills, and eyes) and create the column shown in the center of each poster. The colors in each column are stacked according to the percentage of a given color observed, with the largest share at the column’s top and the smallest share at the column’s base. The bird’s English common name and its scientific binomial are noted on the poster’s base, along with information on the bird’s sex, and, if relevant, plumage variation.

The resulting posters are visually compelling tributes to each featured species. Exhibited together, the posters can also be organized into a loose color taxonomy, providing an alternative, aestheticized approach to classifying or grouping these species.

I hope that the “Field Guide” posters will be appreciated by bird nerds, designers, and lovers of Josef Albers (🟪🟦🟩), but the project is also a playful way for me to both celebrate and critique the necessarily imperfect science of taxonomy.

The Parsha Project

As part of a communications and design job I held from 2016-2018, I created illustrations inspired by the weekly Torah portion, or parsha. Each Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), the artwork appeared on the cover of Congregation Beth Sholom’s service pamphlet, along with an expository note about the image and its inspiration. In all, I created over 112 illustrations, beginning with Parashat Beshalach (13 Shevat 5776 / January 23, 2016) and concluding with Parashat Vayikra (1 Nisan 5778 / March 17, 2018).

My artwork and writing generally wrestle with contemporary constructions of nature and the human relationship to non-human animal species. That’s my wheelhouse. My projects rarely draw on my Jewish identity, practice, or knowledge base in obvious ways. It was a privilege, therefore, to spend two years closely reading and visually interpreting Torah, a text that’s familiar to so many, but earnestly read by too few. Because I created each parsha illustration with its destination - a pamphlet cover – in mind, I felt the illustrations should *not* be displayed on their own; they are meant to appear framed by text. This preference gave rise to the poster format, which best reflects the project’s constituent parts: interpretation, illustration, and design.

Here, four of the posters that were selected by the Jewish Community Library (San Francisco) to be included in “The Parsha Project,” on view now through November 14. Maybe I’ll see you at the opening reception on Thursday, September 26, 6:30pm.

Details about the exhibition can be found here.