Requiem II
Apr. 14th, 2006 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinYesterday's Sketchbook - Fooling around with Carrot (WooOOOooo! Okay, not in that sense.)
Today's Sketchbook - The second annual Dead Bird Drawings. Yesterday, a crow died in our yard. It had been hanging around looking pretty sick when I left for work in the morning, and when I came home it was sitting on the railing by the front door and didn't move when I walked right up to it, so I knew it wasn't long for this world. On one hand, it's sad because I like crows, but on the other, it's happy because I like crows but they can never hold still long enough for me to study them. Having one die in my yard is, in some perverse scientific disconnected-from-reality way, an incredible gift. I took about fifty pictures (which I can post online if anyone's interested) and drew a page of beak studies before it got too dark. I'll get out there early tomorrow morning and hopefully get a few more pages in before the CDC comes to pick it up and test for West Nile.
There's something so incredibly beautiful about the design of a bird... the way the different feather groupings interplay, the streamlined shape, the fan of the wings, the versatile and prehistoric-looking beak ... my childhood enthusiasm for ornithology has just been translated into an artistic fascination, combined with some sort of emotional attachment that I can't really explain but which is incredibly moving.
Today's Sketchbook - The second annual Dead Bird Drawings. Yesterday, a crow died in our yard. It had been hanging around looking pretty sick when I left for work in the morning, and when I came home it was sitting on the railing by the front door and didn't move when I walked right up to it, so I knew it wasn't long for this world. On one hand, it's sad because I like crows, but on the other, it's happy because I like crows but they can never hold still long enough for me to study them. Having one die in my yard is, in some perverse scientific disconnected-from-reality way, an incredible gift. I took about fifty pictures (which I can post online if anyone's interested) and drew a page of beak studies before it got too dark. I'll get out there early tomorrow morning and hopefully get a few more pages in before the CDC comes to pick it up and test for West Nile.
There's something so incredibly beautiful about the design of a bird... the way the different feather groupings interplay, the streamlined shape, the fan of the wings, the versatile and prehistoric-looking beak ... my childhood enthusiasm for ornithology has just been translated into an artistic fascination, combined with some sort of emotional attachment that I can't really explain but which is incredibly moving.
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Date: 2006-04-15 04:34 pm (UTC)I hope (beyond reason) that the CDC comes this weekend and not next week while I'm at work ... it'd be cool to talk to them, and maybe I could ask them if they have any skulls left over. :)
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Date: 2006-04-15 08:38 pm (UTC)The bird (possibly even the animal) with the weirdest skull of all is the flamingo. Flamingo skulls are just freaky. Well, normal for a flamingo, but you know what I mean.