"Field Guide" Project In Bay Nature Magazine

The Spring 2023 issue of Bay Nature landed in mailboxes in March and I’m pleased to have my Field Guide series featured in the magazine’s “Nature In The Arts” section.

Published in the print edition as "Bird Watching Reimagined," the write-up is by terrific Bay Area arts writer Matthew Harrison Tedford, who provides a thoughtful overview of Field Guide. I especially like his concluding paragraph:

“[Reiger’s] field guides also prod us to think about how and why we classify and perhaps to look at birds a little differently afterward. Reiger sees turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) every day, but through his classification system he began to see them differently, noticing colors that he describes as deep indigo ink, coffee, and dark chocolate, rather than simply seeing a black bird.”

You can also read the piece online (where it appears with the delightful title, “An Artist Goes Bird-Swatching").

"Field Guide" Project In Audubon Magazine

The Winter 2022 issue of Audubon Magazine just landed in mailboxes and I’m delighted to have my Field Guide series featured in the magazine’s “Field Notes” section.

Published in the print edition as "Paint By Plumages," my work is beautifully paired with recent scientific research by Richard Prum (Yale University) and Gabriela Venable (Duke University) on hummingbird plumage color. That hummingbirds perceive their own color differently (and more richly) than we humans do is no surprise, but Prum and Venable learned that “the family’s super-saturated plumages out-hued all other birds species…increasing the total known plumage colors by more than half.” Yowsa.

You can also read a variation of the piece online, titled "This Artist’s Paint-Swatch Portraits Reveal the Beauty of Bird Plumage." (Both articles are by Marion Renault.)

"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.

"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.