The Bird Artist Read Free Page A

passionate character as well. “Birds,” he wrote, “and the making of a bird on the page is the logic of my heart. And yours?” He examined life closely and described things in close-up language. “That belted kingfisher you sent me,” he wrote, “is
pretty good-fine. A solid effort, Mr. Vas. Yet the foot does not seem to encircle the branch but to be laid on a differently pitched surface.” I looked up “pitch” in the dictionary. I drew kingfisher feet on branches for hours, days in a row.
    Whatever praise he divvied out I was intoxicated with for weeks, months! When I would hear that the Aunt Ivy Barnacle had tied up, I would drop everything and run to the wharf. I would follow the burlap mail sacks up to Gillette’s store, even haul them myself, and watch as Romeo distributed envelopes into slots. My family did not have a slot. “Anything for me from Halifax?” I would ask Romeo, a question meant only to narrow down my possible disappointments to one, since Halifax was the only place from which, and Sprague the only person from whom, I had ever received a letter.
    Each of Isaac Sprague’s letters began: “Dear Mr. Vas, Student # 12.” I learned that at any given time throughout the years I worked with him, he kept three dozen or so students through the mail, and also taught a night course, “Nature Drawing,” in a small museum on Agricola Street, the stationery of which he used. The date of each letter was printed below his signature, and each letter ended in an identical way:

    In hopes for improvement, Isaac Sprague

    I have kept all his letters, my own inheritance from those years. “You’ve got a knack,” he wrote on September 7, 1909, “but you are no genius.”

    Out of financial necessity I maintained my other employments, yet privately I considered bird art to be my profession. In secret, a journal such as Bird Lore truly defined my world, or a world I wanted more and more to belong to. I wanted someday to report birds back from Catesby’s Florida, or from Africa, South America, Siberia, any place really; just looking at a globe would keep me awake half the night painting. I was squirreling money away to flee. And though I was stuck in Witless Bay, or thought of it that way, I was in fact able to improve, slowly, to the point where two reputable journals, Maritime Monthly and the more specialized Bird Lore , solicited my sketches and watercolors, both as fillers and to accompany feature articles. Each request, each acceptance, made me feel more hopeful, more alive to the possibility that bird art could be my life. Maritime Monthly , for instance, had paid $1.50 Canadian for the first work I had ever sold, ten pencil sketches of barn swallows which it did not publish yet kept on file. Sprague, of course, had recommended me. He wrote to tell me that he had. I thought of this as a generosity and it was, yet it was also an investment in his own future. The success of his students, within the small world of bird art, reflected well on him, and he asked that I mention him in any correspondence I might have with a journal’s editor. I am certain that he asked the same of all his students.
    In fact, when I had sold the barn swallows, Sprague requested that I send him a 25commission, that one time only. I sent it; I would happily have sent the entire amount I was paid. And I enclosed a lengthy, no doubt overwrought description of a magnolia warbler, along with a torn-out
page from my daily sketchbook, as intimate a document to me as any diary. However, the audacity of a student offering “a preliminary sketch,” as he called it, heartily offended him. He wrote back: “I herewith return your warbler without comment.” That was comment enough. Perhaps it was his custom to give his students a cold shake early on, to slowly step back once they had entered his professional domain. I cannot say for certain. When our