The Bird Artist Read Free

Margaret steer this boat since she was ten. Why, she could take over my job any minute, if need be! She can take apart and put together this newfangled steam engine. She just learned it with native intelligence, eh? She’s always had a talent for mechanical things. That’s something she might not have told you, so I thought that I would.”

    Roughly from 1908 to 1911, I was faithfully apprenticed to a bird artist named Isaac Sprague. I had followed up on his advertisement in the journal Bird Lore , which Mrs. Bath had ordered specially on my behalf. In her will, in fact, she left me all the back issues.
    Sprague lived in Halifax. Above my desk I had tacked a reproduction of his painting of a red-throated loon, which I had torn from an issue of Bird Lore. It was so graceful and transcendent that each time I sat down in front of it to work, it made me want to give up. But then after I had
stared at it, the loon became an inspiration. It was uncanny how that change overtook me. The pencil seemed to move of its own volition. The brush made a beak, feather, eye. It was as if to hesitate or think too much, to resist in any way, would impede the progress of my calling. I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls. Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again. This was an idea I had come up with when I was nine or ten, just after Reverend Sillet’s sermon on the transformation of souls in heaven. I sometimes went to church with my mother. Witless Bay had the Anglican Church of England. I would sit antsy in the pew, or daydream. Having made my own connections between God and birds, I felt moral enough not to have to listen too closely to Sillet’s sermons. Besides, I had already passed my own judgement on Sillet; I had made a few drawings of him taking potshots at a woodpecker on the church belfry.
    It went like this. I would send five carefully packed drawings or watercolors to Halifax, and Sprague would comment by return mail; this might take one summer month, if the Aunt Ivy Barnacle was in good repair and if Enoch did not dawdle on his mail stops, and if fair weather prevailed. But when I sent drawings out just before winter, I would not get Sprague’s reply until spring, because the Aunt Ivy Barnacle would be in dry dock. Anyway, once I did get a letter from Sprague, I would send him two dollars, a lot of money for me. For anyone in Witless Bay, for that matter. To pay
my parents’ room and board, which I had done since I was thirteen, I worked at the dry dock, repairing and painting schooners, trawlers, dories. I sometimes worked side by side with my father. Still and all, I was barely able to afford the inks, special paper, and brushes which I ordered through Gillette’s store, especially after Mrs. Bath died.
    Isaac Sprague’s letters were detailed and impersonal. They kept to subjects such as the shaping of a beak, shadows, color accents. He wrote to me about consciously denying certain background landscapes the opportunity—as he put it—to dominate rather than feature a bird. In one letter he said that bird artists should invoke a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild. He had, for me, a difficult vocabulary and I wrote him a separate letter to say that. He sent me a dictionary for Christmas, 1909, along with a note saying, “Read each of my letters from now on with this book in hand. I’m not going backwards in my education on your behalf.” The dictionary had arrived in October, Christmas greetings inscribed in advance.
    Sprague offered strong opinions in each letter, not just about my work but about bird art in general. Much later, after our correspondence had ended, I realized that all of his musings, asides, complaints, all of his fervor added up to a rare education, not just in craft but in his own