CATHERINE COURTENAYE

WHAT THE NIGHTHAWK KNOWS

April 1st - May 13th, 2023

The common nighthawk “often seen high in the air, flies with easy strokes, ‘changing gear’ to quicker erratic strokes… Often seen in the air over cities, towns.” - Rodger Tory Peterson, Western Birds

My ongoing body of abstract paintings, Avian Witness, developed in part as a response to the growing divide between the natural world and the manmade environment. As wild habitats diminish, I turn to primeval forces—animal migration, magnetic pull, and wind—for inspiration. My work evokes natural patterns as they intersect with the human modified landscape. Birds still migrate, yet often over vast built-up expanses of large cities. Herds of elk and deer move through the landscape in the fall, intersecting more frequently with fences and roads. But as I drive between Montana and other parts of the West, I notice more game-crossing overpasses along well-traveled highways. This human engineering for the sake of wildlife gives me hope.

Over gestural loops of color, the subsequent layers of my paintings are created by silkscreening facsimiles of 19th-century handwriting fragments. These bits of historical letterforms signal human culture. The layering is akin to archeological strata, the literal “ground” of the earth, the landscape. The paintings gradually become representations of historical time; the deepest buried layers feel ancient. On upper surfaces of the paintings, angular patterning represents road grids, agricultural fields, wind turbines, electric transmission lines, and other modern manmade infrastructure.

With a steel-nibbed pen—the type used since the 1850s—I draw species of birds found in the Rockies. These drawings are the basis for large curvilinear traceries on top of the rectilinear compositions. Slowly painted in translucent inky black or drawn more gesturally, bird forms are not obvious once transposed onto the uppermost surface of each painting; rather it is the movement of flight that is transmitted.

By overlaying the geometric, color-filled slivers with flowing black strokes, a complex, polyrhythmic patterning emerges. In making these paintings, I envision how opposing systems of human development and natural forces might coexist in a harmonious ecosystem.