 |
| Katrina Van Grouw |
DETAILS The drawings in Katrina Van Grouw's
"The Unfeathered Bird" were all based on real specimens. Here, a common coot.
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: February 11, 2013
In the acknowledgments to her unsettling and
irresistible book, “The Unfeathered Bird,” Katrina van Grouw pauses in her
listing of names to say, “I must assure readers that no birds were harmed
during the making of this book.”
It seems an odd disclaimer for a collection of
bird drawings, until you look at the drawings. The birds in this book are not
merely unfeathered, they are also skinned, skeletal and sometimes — to serve
the presentation of a skull or a wing, a tongue or a trachea — disassembled.
Then they are drawn and described in the text,
with great skill and attention to the details — of their structure, their
evolution and their lives — and with a slightly wicked sense of humor that
appears often enough to lift the book beyond another compendium of bird life.
A certain amount of mischief is inherent in the
plan of the book. The birds, sometimes muscled, sometimes only skeletons, all
drawn from real specimens that either died accidentally or were already
preserved in collections, are posed as they might have been in life — flying,
standing, walking.
The resulting drawings, detailed and
monochromatic, will please those with a taste for the mildly grotesque. I
particularly loved the red-and-green macaw and budgerigar that appear on facing
pages. The macaw is drawn with most of its skin removed, but it retains its
musculature, scaly feet, and piercing eyes that stare directly at you as it
perches on one leg, holding a pencil to its beak with its other foot. The stare
seems to demand a response, but I had no idea what to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment