July 29-Sept. 24, 2022 | Gerald Peters Gallery | Santa Fe, NM

Birds of a Feather

Penelope Gottlieb channels John James Audubon for new show at Gerald Peters Gallery.

Prior to John James Audubon’s paintings of birds, ornithological drawings were wooden and static. Audubon (1785-1851) stuffed the dead birds with cotton and arranged them in life-like compositions with wire. Penelope Gottlieb uses reproductions from Audubon’s extraordinary portfolio of engravings, Birds of America, as the basis for her own contemporary observations. She comments, “The painful paradox of Audubon’s work remains that his wonderful images of nature relied on its ghoulish and insatiable exploitation.” She sites Audubon remarking that “a day without shooting a hundred birds is a day wasted.” She notes, as well, that at the time Audubon hunted and painted, nature was thought to be abundant and would perpetuate itself indefinitely.Penelope Gottlieb, Abelmoschus moschatus, acrylic and ink over a digital reproduction of an Audubon print, 60 x 40”

In her Invasive Plant series, she says, “The images stage an invasion of this historical imagery, enacting the ravages of a contemporary ecological phenomenon wherein non-native species are introduced into an environment and overtake the balance of its delicate ecosystem. By problematizing the renowned ornithologist’s idyllic representations of natural history, I present a revisionist vision of nature in its current state of compromise and literal bondage.”

Using Audubon’s Marsh Hawk engraving, Gottlieb invades the image with Abelmoschus moschatus or muskmallow as well as other plants that begin to bind and strangle the hawks. “Working with these iconic, beautiful plates,John James Audubon (1785-1851), Marsh Hawk (Falco Cyaneus), 1837, Plate CCCLVI, 38¼ x 25 5/8”. Audubon’s Birds of America, Darlington Digital Library, University of Pittsburgh.

I began to imagine how different the world was in Audubon’s time and how differently I feel about nature than he did. In my work I can make a comment on the difference between his sense of the natural order and my current sense of unease.”Penelope Gottlieb, Cylindropunita imbricata, acrylic and ink over a digital reproduction of an Audubon print, 38 x 26”

She incorporates symbolic elements into her compositions in the manner of the complex Vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Here, a marsh hawk picks at a gold pocket watch rather than the entrails of the captured prey in Audubon’s image. The watch symbolizes fleeting time.

The right side of her painting recalls the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) whose lush post-impressionist jungle paintings were inspired by illustrations in children’s books and visits to botanical gardens. Gottlieb explains that Rousseau was a customs officer who never left the environs of Paris. “I began to wonder if our experience of the wilderness in the future could be relegated to an artificial experience like his,” she adds.Penelope Gottlieb, Akebia quinata, acrylic and ink over a digital reproduction of an Audubon print, 38 x 26”