Winging It | Avian Art

By James D. Balestrieri

Somewhere, someone once wrote, “What man wouldn’t give his life to be a bird for half an hour?” I have it in mind that it was the 19th-century English art historian and philosopher Walter Pater, but I may be wrong. Whoever it was, the sentiment is strong. To fly, to sing, to light like a feather, to hop, and rise to flutter and soar once again—30 minutes of that might just be worth an earthbound human life in trade. It’s tempting, and the temptation is all the greater when I take in the avian art of Shae Warnick, Alex Warnick and Penelope Gottlieb.

What is it about birds, since the dawn of human time, that makes them different, that makes us want not only to know them but to render them as symbols and signifiers? Is it simply that they fly? Do birds have some relationship to time that is mysterious to us? They are, after all, our “canaries in the coal mine.” And why do we so closely associate birds with flowers and plants? Is it simply habitat and food, color and pattern, or something more?

The art and thoughts of Shae, Alex and Penelope offer a great deal of insight into the answers to these and other questions.

In Shae’s paintings, birds and plants are woven into tapestries of interconnectedness and, by inference, interdependence. The overall effect, however, is, by design, decorative, though this, too, has meaning for the artist, and for us. Shae describes this in the following way: “For me, I’m always arranging elements into decorative systems. Even when the imagery isn’t overtly patterned, I structure it that way. Birds and plants naturally lend themselves to decorative compositions. They repeat, they echo and build rhythm.”

Rhythms of form and color are apparent in the three paintings THE FAR HORIZON, WHOOPING CRANE AND CURLEW, and IBIS IN ICELANDIC POPPY, yet, as Shae continues, “There’s also a cultural layer to my work. Over time, nature has played an increasingly decorative role in our lives. Most people don’t live in it the way humans used to, instead we curate it in controlled ways. Depictions of birds and plants together become a kind of constructed nature, something ordered and contained. When they appear together in my work, it’s not just about ecology. It’s about how we experience nature now. It’s wild, but it’s also manicured. It’s alive, but it’s also arranged. It’s something we’re inside of and outside of at the same time.”

In Shae’s work, the underlying design, the very disposition of the forms on the canvas, conveys her interpretation of our current relationship with the natural world, a world in which the concept of the word “natural” may indicate a complex artifice curated for us, by us, in ways that please us, rather than any realm of capital “N” Nature that exists apart from and outside of us.

Still, as Shae says, birds retain a good bit of the mystery we ascribe to them. She explains, “If you’re standing in a field or on a skyscraper in New York, you’ll find birds. They’re the part of nature that comes to you. They’re familiar and everywhere, but at the same time they feel out of reach. They move through spaces we can’t inhabit, and in nearly every culture they’ve carried meaning beyond themselves. Birds seem to live in that ‘brilliant betweenness,’ between what we understand and what we don’t.”

For Alex—sister and identical twin to Shae—it is the physical, morphological differences between human beings and birds, and our classification of them among things we have deemed beautiful, that has led to our fascination with our avian friends. “Birds are literally works of art,” she affirms, “making it natural for human artists to want to render them. But I think beyond that, birds are the most accessible of all wildlife. Because they have the safety of flight, they allow humans to live in closer proximity than most other animals would tolerate. That makes it possible for them to live among us as neighbors while remaining wild and genuinely other. I think that combination of being intimate but untamed is part of what has made them so intriguing to people throughout history and across cultures.”

Some of the same feelings of weaving, of the warp and woof of bird and plant that characterize Shae’s paintings emerge from Alex’s works, but the impressions that, say, AMERICAN GOLDFINCHES AND THISTLE or EVENING GROSBEAK AND PRAIRIE ROSE leave on the viewer are quite different and singular. If Shae’s work has the quality of weaving, Alex’s communicates something closer to the quilt. The wax that is crucial to her technique renders both birds and plants with a shared softness that stitches them together in time and place.

As Alex explains, “Aesthetically, in my paintings the plant I choose is a conversation partner for the bird. I think that’s true in nature too. Birds and flowering plants have co-evolutionary partnerships that have worked to shape each other over millions of years. A bird removed from its botanical context is a specimen, but within it, it’s a living creature. It becomes a portrait of a relationship. Birds and flowers together also become expressions of a specific season or place. For example, a Baltimore oriole in blooming crabapple only exists in one specific region and time, making it a symbol for May in the Midwest. Together, birds and plants carry meaning.”

Conversely, Penelope’s art makes a direct connection between the environmental and aesthetic pasts and our present precarious moment on the planet, though she describes the difficulties in getting others to see the value of her endeavor. “I had often been cautioned against painting flowers, told the subject was not serious,” she says. “That resistance only deepened my commitment to depicting nature in a way that reflects the instability and acceleration of change in our present moment. In my studio were several prints by John James Audubon, which led me to consider the vastly different world he inhabited. In his time, the natural world seemed inexhaustible—passenger pigeons once filled the sky in numbers so vast they could darken it for days. Now they are extinct. The very word ‘extinction’ didn’t even exist in Audubon’s day; such loss was inconceivable.”

The past is the canvas on which the present paints and writes, inscribing its layer of time atop earlier layers, each one overwriting and overpainting another in an eternal palimpsest that is as true of the cycles of the natural world as it is of the human experience. Our worlds collide, overlap and are dependent on and superimposed on one another. Penelope saw this and incorporated it into her facture. “I began to appropriate plates from Birds of America, she says, “as a way to enter into a dialogue with the past. This allowed me to contrast a historical vision of abundance with a contemporary experience shaped by loss and disruption. Over time, the birds became stand-ins for the self, their fate inseparable from our own. It is now estimated that more than 500 bird species may disappear within this century. In my paintings, they come to represent the natural world at large, often overtaken by invasive plants introduced through human activity.”

Paired with invasive trumpet flowers, wisteria and day lilies, imports that adorn our gardens, native species of birds, on Audubon’s famous plates, are entwined and imprisoned in their vines and flowers. In WISTERIA SINENSIS, for example, the vase, imitative of the Ming porcelain that “reached European shores in 1602” and set off a craze that led “Dutch potters to create Delftware,” floats on a seemingly endless, rising sea. The species of birds, insects and reptiles taking refuge—yellow-billed magpie, Steller’s jay, Ultramarine Jay, Clark’s crow, Karner blue butterfly, blue ground beetle, blue dasher dragonfly and blue-tailed mole skink—are, as Penelope writes, existing in “shirking habitats” or are “currently endangered.” She continues, “Beauty and unease coexist. Nature turns against nature.” Species come and go, evolve and vanish. Penelope’s work seems to stay. The porcelain vase on a roiling sea, the flora, the fauna: they are a microcosm, emblematic of the planet as a whole, of our interdependence and a balance we have the power to preserve or tip at our peril.

My dad loved birds and raised ducks and gamebirds when he worked on an estate as a young man. I inherited his go-to bird book, a 1936 edition of a 1917 book, Birds of America. The color plates are after the paintings of pioneering ornithologist Louis Agassiz Fuertes and the black-and-white drawings are by Rex Brasher and others. There are also black-and-white photos. It’s a big book, more like a large dictionary, rather than a pocket guide. The writing is elegant, the facts as up to date as they could be in 1917/1936. More than one now endangered and extinct species seems to be have been around when the book was published (the ivory-billed woodpecker, for example), while others (the passenger pigeon and great auk) get long, cautionary entries detailing their extirpation and our part in it. Still others, the whooping and sandhill cranes, for instance, have made remarkable comebacks. I hear their flying saucer warble high in the March sky in Wisconsin.

Birds of America isn’t a coffee-table book. I turn to it whenever I see a bird I’ve identified but know little about. Sometimes I just take it down and read it. It’s worn, the spine is weak, some of the pages are loose. I see some scribbles on the endpapers, a 2-year-old’s attempt to draw a bird. Coffee-table books don’t typically get that much love, unless they are about birds.

Birds are art. So are we. So is everything. And wouldn’t it be better if, rather than as resource, as raw material, we saw the world as art, imagining ourselves as birds, free as birds? A half hour—though preferably much more—with the art of Shae Warnick, Alex Warnick and Penelope Gottlieb would offer us a bird’s-eye view of the answer to that question.

meet the artistsPenelope GottliebAlex WarnickShae Warnick

This story appeared in the June/July 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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