SPRING 2001/VOLUME 15, NUMBER 2

Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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James Coe reflects on his life and his art

If you've seen the "Bird of the Week" feature on the Lab's web site, then you're probably already an admirer of James Coe's artwork. Best known as author and illustrator of the 1994 Golden Guide, Eastern Birds, Jim has contributed plates to other field guides, and his work has also appeared on the covers of well-known birding and ornithological publications. He is currently working on Western Birds, a companion volume to his eastern bird guide. Jim lives with his wife and two young children on the western rim of New York's Hudson Valley. I spoke with him recently and am pleased to share Jim's reflections about his work.

James Coe at work in his studio.

Allison: Which came first, the birds or the art?

Jim: I remember the first bird that really got me "hooked" as a birder. I saw it on a hot, lazy morning in the late summer of 1971 or '72. I was hanging out on the roof of our house (as teenage boys do), and I noticed a small bird flitting in the canopy of the maple overhead. I was able to see the field marks and when I got back to my room, I looked through my new Peterson field guide. It was a Canada Warblerthe first warbler I had ever seen. I was hooked. And still, today, Canada Warblers have a special meaning for me.

Allison: Yes, Blackburnian Warblers have the same meaning for me. When and how did painting become part of who you are?

Jim: A childhood friend that I often went birding with came from a creative family, and he began painting the birds we saw. The two of us decided to compile our own field guide to the birds in our town, and I've stuck with it ever since. It was around that time that I decided being a bird artist would be the perfect career, and I never seriously considered anything else.

Allison: Fortunately for the rest of us, you have not denied us your talent. What was your first published piece of bird art?

Jim: Believe it or not, my first published workwas in Living Bird, back in 1975 when it was an annual journal.

Allison: Well, believe it or not, I did not know that when I asked that question!

Jim: I had two pieces in that issue: a black-and-white watercolor of a Golden Eagle and a rather crude scratchboard sketch of a Barred Owl. I was 18 years old, just finishing high school, and I was incredibly proud to be included in a publication along with many of the great bird artists of the time, including my mentor, Don Eckelberry. The director of the Lab and editor of Living Bird at that time was Douglas Lancaster, a great patron of bird art, who went out of his way to include works by many lesser-known and younger artists. I will always be grateful to him for opening the door for me.

Allison: You've since become widely published. What piece or project are you most proud of?

Jim: No contest. My field guide, Eastern Birds, is still my proudest accomplishment. It represents seven years of painstaking work, but more importantly, the completed project is very close to the book I set out to write. I am proud of my stubborn insistence on "doing it right." My editors and my agent and my family were all crying for me to finish, but I took the time I thought was needed and made no compromises in the quality of my work. Indeed, today, as I labor to complete the paintings and text for the long-overdue companion guide, Western Birds, I appreciate the magnitude of my original feat.

Allison: That's inspiring. Thank you for being true to your vision. Who are your favorite bird artists?

Jim: From the past, my favorite would have to be Louis Agassiz Fuertes. His work has grown on me over the years. His economy of brushwork and the sureness of his drawings are astounding, especially compared with the photographically realistic style of bird art that is so widely published today.

Allison: It's interesting that through your own contributions to the Lab, you are enriching that part of the Lab's artistic history that began with Fuertes. Do you have a favorite contemporary bird artist?

Jim: My favorite is Swedish artist Lars Jonsson, who can work wonders in any medium, it seems. His field sketches can be mere pencil scratches with wisps of watercolor and yet perfectly catch the essence of a bird. His precisely rendered field guide plates are equally awe inspiring. Here in America, I think Larry McQueen and Barry Van Dusen are the best field artists working today.

Allison: And Larry, too, has a special relationship with the Lab, having painted the exquisite FeederWatch posters. Tell me, what's in your CD player right now, and what, if anything, does it have to do with your art?

Jim: Good question. Right now I am listening to trumpeter Nicholas Payton's Payton's Place disk. It's straight-ahead jazzearthy and full of energy, with a beat I can tap my brushes to and a melodic line I can scat along with. I also love listening to jazz guitar, vintage swing, and folk-rock albums from my youth.

Allison: Wow! My swing band could use another vocalist. Too bad you don't live closer, we could scat some duets together from center stage during the Ithaca Festival! What's your favorite medium?

Jim: My favorite is oil paint, which I have been using recently for my plein air landscape paintings. I had not painted in oils for nearly 15 years, and I am so thrilled to have rediscovered it. I love its visceral qualities; the smell, the greasiness, and the wonderful way it drags across the weave of the canvas. I prefer to work on a medium-textured canvasstretched in larger sizes and glued to Masonite boards for small field studies.

Allison: Sounds wonderful. How do you prepare yourself to begin work? Is there a weather preference? Coffee versus tea? Favorite clothes? What are your essentials?

Jim: Overall, my working rhythm is somewhat cyclical, with an intense creative streak often followed by a lull. On a daily basis, my best working hours are midmorning, after I've said goodbye to my family for the day, stoked up on coffee, and checked my e-mail. The warm glow of a sunny day inspires me to work, but I also love the landscape blanketed in snow and fog.

Allison: You mentioned checking your e-mail. Do you feel as though the advent of Internet technology has helped or hurt art and artists?

Jim: Like most technological advances, the Internet can be a force for evil as well as for good. I think the opportunities for an artist to promote and disseminate artwork over the Internet are incredible. The potential audience is staggering. But the immediacy of computer technology has, I think, contributed to the shortened patience of publishers and editors. Illustrators are often rushed to produce work of inferior quality. For me, the Internet provides connections to my peers and to my publishers in a way that the phone and regular mail could never do. When I painted the cover illustration for last January's Auk, I was able to attach scanned images of my preliminary color sketches to an e-mail and get feedback from an ornithologist in Hawaii, all within just a few hours.

Allison: That really is amazing.

Jim: But for all its convenience, the computer is also a time sponge- I can easily waste a morning browsing the Internet or wrestling with a computer glitch. My secret vice is eBay. But when I marvel at the productivity of many great artists of the past, I realize that today we are distracted by so many enticing technological wonders. I think it would have been easier to stay focused in a simpler age.

Allison: Can you talk about your most recent work?

Jim: I have several new oil paintings of birds set in the landscape that I have been working on in the studio recently. One is of a scene I saw last winter from my studio window: a Barred Owl sitting out in the open, low in an elm, while chickadees flit in and out of the scene to scold him. Like my plein air landscape studies, these larger paintings are an entirely different experience from my book illustrations. In
these paintings, I am constantly struggling against my inclination to fill in every detail of the bird and to keep the handling evenly painterly and loose throughout the painting.

Allison: Yes, I can imagine. Do you have a dream project that you'd like to do someday?

Jim: One idea that comes to mind as I look (longingly) across my studio at the last set of landscapes I painted (two views of a distant Catskill ridge with the warm March sunlight casting cool blue shadows across the peach-tinged snow-covered hills in the foreground) would be a real "artist's" project. I'd love to paint a succession of on-site landscape studies depicting three or four local sites in all seasons (the places would represent distinctive habitat typesfor instance, a beaver pond, a hay field, a woodland creek). I would visit each spot weekly over the course of a year. And each painting would be my artist's snapshot or a visual diary entry for that day.

Allison: I love that idea, a "visual diary."

Jim: I think the series would make a wonderful gallery exhibit or picture book. And I couldn't think of a more satisfying way to spend a year.

Allison: I know the perfect place to display it. Do you have any advice for aspiring bird artists?

Jim: Avoid shortcuts and strive for perfection. For me, the process of preparing more than 150 field guide plates in eight years was the intensive apprenticeship that refined my skills. I'd also advise them to focus on their drawing. No amount of rendered detail or shimmering effects of light and color or fancy brushwork can save a poorly drawn picture. Be prepared to redraw a bird 10, maybe 20 times (on a separate sheet of tracing paper), before committing any paint to the paper. Most importantly, I'd insist that they keep going back into the field to look at live birds. There is no way to make a drawing come to life if you don't know intimately what a live bird doeshow it moves, how it grasps a branch with its toes, how it balances.

Allison: When you think about it, that last part is good advice not only for artists but for anyone interested in birds. There's magic in those kinds of discoveries. Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Jim: You're welcome. I've enjoyed it.

This spectacular plate from James Coe's new field Guide, Western Birds, depicts (moving clockwise from the lower left corner) a Chukar, a pair of Gambel's Qual, a Scaled Quail, a pair of California Quail, and a Mountain Quail.