Upland Game Birds

The tradition of sporting still-lives addresses both the beautiful as well as melancholic aspects of the dead bird in hand. These are mementa mori—reminders of mortality. Though the birds may be elegantly composed and beautiful drawn, they are also reminders that we live and eat at the expense of another.

This native grassland grouse is generally not doing well. I saw 15% of Michigan’s population on the booming grounds one morning, a scant three years before they went extinct. These however were drawn from Kansas birds where some western counties have strong populations that are legally hunted. They are printed lithographically with second growth birch and some young white pines, now protected from wild-fires, symbolically filling in the prairie remnants that are their last refugia.

There is a long European tradition of sporting scenes and still lives that is primarily a celebration of privilege but also a reminder of one’s mortality amid plenty. It was primarily a Baroque tradition, a time thought of as the age of enlightenment, which generated great technical innovations as well inquisitions, plagues and horrific wars, commemorated with ossuaries— chapels decorated in tens of thousands of human bones. The bird is dead and hanging to age the meat. The composition is as static as the bird is dead.

In European painting there is a tradition of portraying the temptations of the desert fathers, especially St. Anthony. It is a device which allows an artist great freedom in playing with imaginative demons and evil tempters, which are always more fun than saints. For me the temptations are those of the hunter for whom the piles of dead game represent work and the seduction is of course, to just keep killing. St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, looks forward to his next kill, tantalizing as the Holy Gail in the offing. The only dull and uninteresting element in the etching is predictably, the saint himself.