When Washington DC-based artist William Newman first installed a salvaged brass ship’s porthole in his upstairs shower wall, he assumed the protruding ledge would make a welcome perch for birds. Yet the space stayed vacant for nine years, until a pair of Common Grackles built a nest and laid four eggs in spring 2001. Enthralled and intrigued, Newman started filming the new family after the eggs hatched. He created two compelling, complementary projects from the resulting footage.
Newman composed seventeen oil paintings from still images taken from the original film into an intriguing series.. By juxtaposing an accelerated video documentation of the birds’ development with a series of meticulously painted still images, Newman simultaneously illustrates nature’s majesty and banality. Through one frame every two seconds shown repeatedly on loop the video evokes an awareness of nature’s continuous processes. As the video zips through the birds’ early blind feedings, their searching movements through the nest and then their first flight, the birds appear less interesting as individual Grackles than as pieces of nature’s grand, eternally regenerating system.
Watching the bird’s under-developed bodies as they squirm and struggle is as frightening as it is inspiring. The speed of the scenes imparts a sense of mindless action, illustrating how the birds parent by instinct. At the same time, the video’s momentum creates enough distance from nature’s normal routine that some visual features appear arrestingly abstract. In the video, light passes through the baby birds’ red and blue-veined beaks as they open their mouths to be fed, giving the infants a horrific appearance. Later, the mother bird’s care for her brood suddenly seems aggressive and the babies appear to be rightfully fleeing danger when they make their fledgling flights. As summed up by Newman, “everything in the video seems more violent than it actually was as I was watching it take place.”
In contrast to the video’s velocity, Newman’s paintings poetically glorify passages in the birds’ early life with their splendid color and the smoothness of the well-rendered forms. Grackles are bland little birds, but Newman deploys a range of exalted traditional materials to paint scenes from the birds’ lives. Newman renders his intimate view of the nest on a monumental scale.
Throughout his influential career in the Washington DC art scene, Newman has used timeless techniques to eloquently express his insights on topical personal or political issues. He is known for combining photo-realist exactitude with the wit of Jules Pfeiffer In this series, Newman dedicated years and dozens upon dozens of layers of carefully applied paint to depict common little Grackles thereby validating the birds’ humble beauty and subtle fascination. In selecting this unexpected subject matter Newman is proving Art in America critic Joe Shannon’s assertion that, “”Bill Newman's work conveys a defiant fierce humor--a kind smiling nobility. In all Newman's work we hear life yelling!”
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a New York/London based critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University.
