Chris Maynard | Between Here & the Heavens

Chris Maynard summons the poetic spirit of birds through an unconventional medium

By Norman Kolpas

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

IN PERFECT SILHOUETTE, a flight of swallows sweeps upward toward the bare branch of a tree. The birds do not alight, however, once they reach it. Instead, as they soar beyond the leafless limb, they magically become perfect five-pointed stars, dancing in the heavens.

SWALLOWS AND STARS, a recent work by Chris Maynard, captivates in its composition alone. The bird images themselves are impeccably rendered, each one an individual yet true to the anatomy and behavior of the species. The suggestion of the branch possesses the spare verisimilitude of a brush stroke in an Asian ink drawing. The stars, by contrast, iconically capture the stellar bodies we’ve all aimed to draw since childhood: precise, symmetrical, and so pointy that they really do seem to twinkle.

And yet there is one more element, perhaps not evident at first glance, that moves the artist’s highly imaginative work beyond enchanting to downright magical. Its medium is not ink, watercolor, or pencil—Maynard has painstakingly fashioned the images entirely from feathers, even transforming the shaft of a plume into the bough that delineates the border between the earth and the sky.

“My main mission,” the artist says, explaining his uncommon choice of medium and the expressive heights to which his creations soar, “is to promote and foster in people an appreciation and understanding of the natural world.” What better subject for him could there be, then, but the planet’s avian creatures, and what better material to use in depicting them than their own plumage? “All over the world, in every nation, for every race, every gender, for everybody, feathers represent us wanting to fly but not being able to. They’ve become symbols for healing, achievement, success, transformation. Feathers are bridges between here and the heavens.”

MAYNARD REMEMBERS gaining both inspiration and solace from birds at an early age. That deep connection had its earliest stirrings in a third-grade field trip to an observatory, after which he was so overwhelmed by the infinity of the universe that he began hyperventilating and passed out while riding the bus back to school.

Four years later, as a preteen, he sought refuge one afternoon from his three “wonderful but bothersome” younger sisters in the woods surrounding their home in Bellevue, near Seattle. He gazed up to watch a bird fly high between two fir trees. Suddenly, a feather from the bird drifted slowly down directly to him. He recounted the experience in a 2015 TEDx talk he gave to an enraptured audience in Olympia, WA, where he now lives. “As on the bus,” he said, “I sensed my insignificance in the world.” But this time, thanks to the feather, he wasn’t scared. He began to see existence “as both awesome and awful.” In order to strengthen his grasp on the awesomeness, he embarked on enthusiastic studies of the physical and natural sciences along with the visual arts.

Those passions ultimately led Maynard to earn a bachelor’s degree in biology from The Evergreen State College in Olympia in 1987. He went on to an active career as a biologist concentrating largely on water rights and water ecology; he helped navigate a pathway between the disparate needs of the State of Washington and almost 30 Native American tribes while juggling such issues as population growth, power generation, salmon spawning, irrigation, and drinking water. Through it all, he notes, his guiding principal for often-complex negotiations was “fostering an appreciation of the natural world.”

All the while, art of any kind was only an occasional pastime for him. His mother had been trained professionally in the arts and worked in a studio adjacent to the family home. She successfully sold her oil paintings and later developed a reputation as a superb practitioner of the expressive Japanese brush-and-ink art called sumi-e. “She did a really good job of not discouraging my sisters and me from art,” Maynard says. “We all grew up with the ability to just kind of live in a little bit of a dreamland.” Still, as an adult, Maynard occasionally did a little sculpture, but that was the extent of his creative endeavors.

Then, in 2008, when Maynard was in his mid-50s, his mother died. The loss led him to “a big ‘What am I doing in my life?’” moment. He decided to start exploring art more seriously and “to figure out a particular angle of art that I would love and that would speak to people.”

Birds, and more specifically their feathers, struck him as ideal. He started out exploring his subject primarily through photography. By way of example, Maynard describes “taking 108 species of incredibly beautiful, metallic starling feathers and making composite photographs of them.” In another project, he photographed macro images from the intricately patterned feathers of the Great Argus pheasant, combining them in a natural alphabet of every letter from A to Z and the numerals 0 through 9.

Eventually, Maynard says, he began noticing other things in the Great Argus plumes. “There were little shapes that looked like birds, trying to fly out of the feather,” he says. Using ophthalmic surgery scissors, forceps, and magnifying glasses that had belonged to his father, an eye surgeon who passed away in 2012, Maynard cut out those shapes. He employed stainless-steel entomology pins—the same sort used for displaying insect specimens—to suspend the cutouts and the feathers from which they came about half an inch above a white background. He displayed the composition behind glass in a sturdy wooden frame. “And that,” he says, “was my first shadow box.”

Maynard’s imaginative shadow boxes featuring artwork intricately fashioned from natural feathers soon gained attention from museums, galleries, and collectors. In the first three years alone, he
participated in events including Birds in Art at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI; Artists for Conservation in Vancouver; Animals in Art at Louisiana State University; Art Miami; and the Society of Animal Artists’ Art and the Animal exhibition at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, NY. In 2016, his work won the coveted People’s Choice Award at the Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver.

Meanwhile, the respect his art commanded at such gatherings gained him gallery representation not only locally but also in New York, Paris, and in Santa Fe’s Gerald Peters Gallery. Of that last prestigious venue, Maynard remarks that at first, they regarded his artworks as “kind of a curiosity. Now my shadow boxes are among the bestsellers, and we’ve been having solo shows there for the last three years.”

DESPITE such ever-growing demand, his creative process remains as thoughtful and meticulous as ever. It begins with the notebooks that are always with him, as they were not too long ago when he was an artist-in-residence at the Curi-Cancha Reserve, a birdwatcher’s paradise in the mountains of Costa Rica. “Every morning,” he says, “I’d walk about four kilometers through the forest to go to breakfast at another reserve. And I’d sit there and eat my eggs and rice and watch the hummingbirds at the feeders they had. I made all these sketches in my notebooks. And when I came back, I started making art.”

His next step is selecting feathers that naturally hold the potential to fulfill those sketches. In doing so, Maynard scrupulously “honors any laws that protect birds,” whether international or federal, such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Following such restrictions narrowly limits the materials he can use, but he nevertheless has found several allowed species that provide him with the size and range of colors and patterns to fulfill his visions. “Sometimes I’ll take a year to find the right feather,” he says of that search. In the case of his sketches from Costa Rica, he finally settled on using feathers from the ocellated turkey, a wild species found in Central America that has “absolutely stunning” plumage. Once he’s made his choices, he’ll refine his sketches based on the feathers’ particular characteristics.

Then, he sets to work in the 26-by-26-foot studio located between his house and barn on a few acres outside of Olympia. To ensure that the feathers will have archival longevity and that he can cut them precisely without harming their inherent structure, he puts them through a lengthy process he has developed (and won’t divulge) involving backing them under pressure with glues and cotton paper. “That makes them stable and sturdy,” he says. Then he carefully cuts out the desired shapes from the feathers before attaching them—and the feathers from which they were cut—to the pins that will elevate them in their shadow-box frame, where the shadows cast by the cutouts add an important, ethereal visual element.

Looking at the results—for example, HANGING HUMMINGBIRD FLOWERS—often leads viewers to wonder how Maynard applies such vibrant colors to the feathers. “What you see is the actual color of the feathers,” he replies. “I never paint on them or change their color. I always want to respect and honor the feather.”

With so many species in the world, and so much variety in their behavior, Maynard does not at all anticipate running out of subject matter. But he still finds new themes to explore, such as recent works like HERON DREAMS, which imaginatively incorporates not just the bird but also cut-feather silhouettes of the reptiles and rodents it eats. He’s also seeking opportunities to execute larger commissions, like a 5-by-5-foot installation he’s been creating for a hotel in South Carolina. “I like working with people who have a vision,” he says, pausing before adding with a warm laugh, “as long as it’s about birds.”

Indeed, he continues, “This is my focus for my art and always will be. This is what I want to be doing.” Having come so far since those early days of feeling lost in the cosmos, Maynard has most definitely found his secure bridge between earth and heaven.

representation
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Childhood’s End Gallery, Olympia, WA; Ric Michel Fine Art, New York, NY; Galerie Bettina, Paris, France; www.featherfolio.com.

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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