Susan Harby, Visual Artist

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BIRDS
I began a love affair with birds during my first visit to East Africa in 1987. I was on Safari and I heard the most delightful calls. My guide handed me binoculars to see the small singers and I was hooked. Ever since, I have become bird centric. In the 1990�s, I started volunteering at Wild Life Rescue in Palo Alto, CA and cared for orphaned birds and squirrels. They had a freezer full of dead birds and I received permission to borrow them to study. Several of the drawings and paintings shown are inspired from these poor creatures.

In the spring of 2000, I was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Orioles and Cederwax Wings filled the air. Christopher Brown, one of the visiting artists who critiqued my work, suggested I try working in the medium of monotypes. I started with a crude process of printing images made with oils painted on glass. My press was a wood spoon or marble rolling pin. It was a primitive process but it jogged my creative process.

In the summer of that year, I was preparing for an exhibit at the Olive Hyde Gallery in Fremont, California. The gallery had an odd room that I envisioned a circle of 24 paintings that represented 24 hours of the day of a migrating white pelican. The twenty four paintings were hung end to end on the walls. The paintings were all monotypes. Each one was printed many times over on glass. I used the same image of a pelican flying and changed the background and colors. I had been observing the colors at the Palo Alto Baylands of each hour of the day. I would even set my alarm and wake up in the middle of the night to observe the colors of the sky. Four of these paintings are shown in this gallery.

I continue to find dead birds around the neighborhood and save them in my freezer until I have time to study and paint them. This had been unsettling to more than one person who has rummaged through my freezer to find something to eat.