From Room 6:  Content, Style, Medium

Content: Revealing the Outcome of Human-Animal Interactions

The Narrative This painting of an Evening Grosbeak shows what can happen when the techniques of photo-realism pull us into a scene that we fully believe is a real place. Here we meet a bird at eye level and view the landscape as it is reflected back from the fender and hubcap.

Those familiar with Evening Grosbeaks can immediately identify the bird, and those familiar with Studebakers will surely recognize the Champion. The painting is so convincing that the bird seems ready to hop from its perch at the first sign of danger. The realistic rendering encourages a closer look as viewers try to decipher the reflections in the metal for more information about the locality, the car, and the bird. (The tires are modern narrow-banded whitewalls, not the broad-banded ones that would have come with the car originally, and they are clean, so it looks as though the car may still run.) The aesthetic elements--the truncated car, the palette, the bits of yellow that move the eye around the composition, the balance of bright and dull, light and dark, massive and fragile, immobile and flighty, and inanimate and living--all invite viewers to consider the content. The painting suggests multiple themes of obsolesce and senesce, self and other, territory holding and perceived treats to territory, and avian habitat and the human footprint on it.

This portrayal is testimony to the passage of time. The Canadian artist Patricia Pépin has a great appreciation for natural cycles and life spans, “Nature breaks down things all the time, through weather and microorganisms. Everything is being digested all the time, and nowhere is this more evident than on manmade things.” The invasive nature of decay is more apparent upon scrutiny of the car she found “behind a gas station in Maine, with many other vintage cars, in different stages of decrepitude, destined to be restored or salvaged for pieces.” Pépin says, “When I saw this old car in a goldenrod field I was seduced by its peeling chrome and chalky paint.”[55] dw check notes

The artist also has great appreciation for placing birds in a biologically appropriate context: “I needed a yellow bird, geographically correct, to be the focal point of the painting . . . The grosbeak added the perfect note for it seemed to engage in a ‘dialogue’ with the flowers, and its massive beak reminded me of the big fender of the Studebaker.” She also has, of course, a great eye for finding and presenting aesthetic qualities. She approached the composition, “in an abstract way, arranging colors and shapes in a long rectangular canvas . . . primed . . . with bright red before painting the picture.” Why? “I’m curious to see if it will get a warm tint as it gets older, as oil paint becomes more transparent as it ages.”[551]

Viewing the Science Landscapes, even unusual ones like this, can convey the dynamic nature of natural contraction and expansion. In this case, the Studebaker Champion is losing more than paint; it is on its way into the history books and the scrap heap. In contrast, the range of the Evening Grosbeak is expanding, and perhaps this makes the bird the new champion. Not only is the bird an excellent aesthetic choice in this painting, it makes biological sense as well. In terms of territoriality, the behavior recorded here is accurate: birds may aggressively defend their territories against perceived intruders, sometimes even confronting reflections of themselves in shiny chrome surfaces. Some viewers might see the narrative as a provocative metaphor for the needs of birds to regain their hold on habitat overrun by the automobile. As Pepin notes, “‘Champion’ tends to remain in people’s minds, and from the reactions and comments they make when they see it, I have a theory that it’s from seeing a car, sacred and venerated in our society, in this state of rustiness.”[552]
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