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Wild Birds of America: The Art of Basil Ede
Book by Peck, Robert McCracken
136 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1991
3 people want to read
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October 24, 2018
I’m no birder, nor do I want to be, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a good bird sighting, recognizing some birds by their songs, or just idly flipping through bird guides. You will never, however, find me in a taupe multi-pocketed “adventurer’s” vest with half a dozen cameras weighing down my neck and a head bristling with cruel thoughts directed at cats.
I spent many childhood hours poring over animal guides. It was such a strange thrill seeing an animal (even a bug) that I had previously known only from rather schematic drawings comporting “in the wild”. Such a sighting conferred upon the book a living reflection, making the book itself come alive. Is such a seminal experience responsible for my lifelong obsessions with books, as I track life through technically inanimate pages?
The day after getting married I was standing bleary-eyed in a hotel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware waiting for the complimentary breakfast buffet table to be stocked and steamy. Never expecting framed things on the walls of hotels to offer anything of interest to me, I was surprised to find myself gradually focusing my consciousness on a framed four foot image of a pelican directly in front of me. Then my eyes cleared and I was enthralled, though I was suspicious of my enthrallment, thinking that on top of viewing the world with honeymoon eyes I was also caffeine- and pancake- deprived, and so perhaps I shouldn’t trust my appraisal. But I continued to stare at the pelican, my eyes gliding from foot to foot to wing to beak to weird wattle thing on top of beak to the micro-textured shoreline and off into the atmospheric sky. “This is a fantastic image!” I told myself, and the day’s excitement began… I noticed other framed images of birds around the room, and in other rooms. Clearly someone somewhere somewhen had a bird fixation. I was whisked off to my wonderfully solitary childhood – when the lines between animate and inanimate were far more blurry - the day after I got hitched, for real and for good.
I noted the name Basil Ede in my pocket notebook and got on with my marriage, and at the first opportunity to break away I researched Mr. Ede, browsed other images to determine if my fixation on his pelican was a fluke, determined it was no fluke, found that the pelican was included in this book, and bought the book.
Nearly every other image in the book is as worthy of fixation, though in different ways. Each appears natural yet is strangely still, and each has a nice blend of textures, from micro-textured foregrounds and grasses to renderings of individual feathers, to fuzzier backgrounds rich with weather and atmospheric suggestiveness. And many have just a touch of drama – ducks fleeing a storm, osprey clawing a fish, or even just a change of weather like a wind picking up. The birds are noble and stoic, though blank-eyed, as birds are, which lends a wildness to the very controlled paintings.
And these are paintings, watercolors to be exact, but are they art? Personally, I don’t think so, but then I don’t want them to be. I like the charm of their near tackiness as with their size and scaling they aspire to art or something like it, but in their details are so scientific and, frankly, nerdy. And it doesn’t help their aspirations toward art to have a copyright symbol painted, along with the artist’s signature, on each image. These birders cover all their bases. But it is touches like the copyright symbol that endear me to these images, as they take me back to when I made no distinction between a schematic drawing of a bluejay in a paperback book and a painting by Henri Rousseau in a museum. What mattered was what the images did to me and where they took me, and Basil Ede takes me places.
I spent many childhood hours poring over animal guides. It was such a strange thrill seeing an animal (even a bug) that I had previously known only from rather schematic drawings comporting “in the wild”. Such a sighting conferred upon the book a living reflection, making the book itself come alive. Is such a seminal experience responsible for my lifelong obsessions with books, as I track life through technically inanimate pages?
The day after getting married I was standing bleary-eyed in a hotel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware waiting for the complimentary breakfast buffet table to be stocked and steamy. Never expecting framed things on the walls of hotels to offer anything of interest to me, I was surprised to find myself gradually focusing my consciousness on a framed four foot image of a pelican directly in front of me. Then my eyes cleared and I was enthralled, though I was suspicious of my enthrallment, thinking that on top of viewing the world with honeymoon eyes I was also caffeine- and pancake- deprived, and so perhaps I shouldn’t trust my appraisal. But I continued to stare at the pelican, my eyes gliding from foot to foot to wing to beak to weird wattle thing on top of beak to the micro-textured shoreline and off into the atmospheric sky. “This is a fantastic image!” I told myself, and the day’s excitement began… I noticed other framed images of birds around the room, and in other rooms. Clearly someone somewhere somewhen had a bird fixation. I was whisked off to my wonderfully solitary childhood – when the lines between animate and inanimate were far more blurry - the day after I got hitched, for real and for good.
I noted the name Basil Ede in my pocket notebook and got on with my marriage, and at the first opportunity to break away I researched Mr. Ede, browsed other images to determine if my fixation on his pelican was a fluke, determined it was no fluke, found that the pelican was included in this book, and bought the book.
Nearly every other image in the book is as worthy of fixation, though in different ways. Each appears natural yet is strangely still, and each has a nice blend of textures, from micro-textured foregrounds and grasses to renderings of individual feathers, to fuzzier backgrounds rich with weather and atmospheric suggestiveness. And many have just a touch of drama – ducks fleeing a storm, osprey clawing a fish, or even just a change of weather like a wind picking up. The birds are noble and stoic, though blank-eyed, as birds are, which lends a wildness to the very controlled paintings.
And these are paintings, watercolors to be exact, but are they art? Personally, I don’t think so, but then I don’t want them to be. I like the charm of their near tackiness as with their size and scaling they aspire to art or something like it, but in their details are so scientific and, frankly, nerdy. And it doesn’t help their aspirations toward art to have a copyright symbol painted, along with the artist’s signature, on each image. These birders cover all their bases. But it is touches like the copyright symbol that endear me to these images, as they take me back to when I made no distinction between a schematic drawing of a bluejay in a paperback book and a painting by Henri Rousseau in a museum. What mattered was what the images did to me and where they took me, and Basil Ede takes me places.
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