Summative Research prep - exhibition 3

Before starting into my 3rd exhibition I wanted to have a large amount of research under my belt with regards to my knowledge and understanding of tropical birds past just my point of interest. One thing that began an my interest in tropical birds and animals in. general was David Attenborough’s documentaries, specifically his series ‘Life in colour’. This series documented all manner of animals and how they interact with each other and the environment through the use of their colour. This colour be for camouflaging to hide from predators or the use of colour in mating rituals. This is very common in tropical birds so I wanted to rewatch these episodes to study thew birds and the colour palette they have to show off in their plumage as well as what functions those colours actually hold.

When I watched this series, 2 birds peaked my interest specifically in how they use colour as well as the movement of their feathers in which I would like to incorporate into my work.

The first is one of the 42 species of the bird of paradise found recently and documented by Attenborough, that fans out his feathers and body performing a dance to attract females. The chest of the bird is a metallic iridescent blue that gets flashed to the female with this jammed feathers. The outward spread of its plumage draws attention to the bird greatly and allows the colour to be its main feature.

Below are some stills I have taken from David Attenborooughs documentary of this bird of paradise.

This fanned out attention grabbing routine is something also seen with other birds in the tropics. The other bird I am interested in specifically and creates shows like this is Macaws (parrots) with their tail feather and wings held out wide to Gove a sense of scale to them to appear more impressive to females and to ward off other males from their territory.

As well as these parrots an obvious example most would think of as a bird using its feathers in a fan the draw attention to themselves is the peacock.

I really enjoyed this concept and I wanted to incorporate it into my work. With wood and bark texture being a key part of my art practice here, I decided after this research that I wanted to mimic the idea of a birds fan to draw attention to my painted piece in my third exhibition, using different sticks and branches. I had chosen to do this using some blossom branches to add a little bit of colour to my ‘fan’ surrounding my painting. This can be seen in the exhibition part of this blog.