April 1, 2024
From the Spring 2024 challenge of Dwelling Chook journal. Subscribe now.
Artist Jake Messing creates lush, collage-like works which are a contemporary tackle colourful, Baroque-era nonetheless lifes. He attracts inspiration from the life-and-death cycles of nature, and the attention-grabbing or uncommon behaviors he’s noticed whereas exploring the outside, corresponding to shrikes impaling their prey and cardinals attacking automobile mirrors. For his watercolor Azure Guard, he was impressed by an statement of mobbing habits throughout a late-summer journey to the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. “We noticed a bunch of three Blue Jays land in a tree close to a perching red-tail, after which begin dive-bombing and making a bunch of noise,” says Messing. Not like the Crimson-tailed Hawk in his portray, Messing says the hawk he noticed getting mobbed “didn’t appear to be it cared an excessive amount of.”