Local artists put their touch on birdhouses for ArtFest fundraiser
Tiffany Patterson’s birdhouse has a death theme, maybe, but it’s a rosy, cozy kind of death.
She used a sander to round the corners of the pine box and acrylic paint and ink to create images of a skull and lifeless trees on its exterior. But the dead things are pink and pastel, and the skull has a heart-shaped nose. The hole in its forehead – where the birds would go in – is circled by flower petals she shaped from clay and painted mauve.
It’s “something whimsical but also a little darker,” said Patterson – reflecting her interest lately in the “death-positive movement,” which aims to make death just another, nonterrifying, part of life.
It’s a lot to think about on a little birdhouse. And if you go to ArtFest this weekend, you’ll have a bunch more birdhouses to ponder. In all, Inland Northwest artists transformed 33 plain boxes into works of art to be sold in a silent auction during the fair. The auction will raise money for children’s art activities at ArtFest and the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, which runs the annual event, said Jerry Smith, a MAC development officer.
Continuing the theme, children attending ArtFest can decorate their own pine birdhouses in the Make It Art area on the tennis courts at Coeur d’Alene Park. (The birdhouse project costs $4. Costs vary for other children’s projects.)
The artists who created birdhouses include well-known names among artists and collectors – Harold Balazs, Mel McCuddin, Melissa Cole, Ric Gendron – and some artists Smith learned about through word of mouth as he sought participants.
As for directions, he pretty much delivered the birdhouses and told the artists to go for it.
Results varied.
Painter Tim Lord attached “probably 20 pounds of metal, from barbed wire to steel rusted rods” to his birdhouse, Smith said: “It’s like a birdhouse where birds go to get tattoos.”
Normally a watercolorist, Stan Miller said he used acrylic paint to create a portrait of a man named Nick who appears in other paintings Miller’s made, too. The graying man walked past Miller’s booth once at an art fair, and the artist thought he had an interesting face. Nick agreed to serve as a model.
Nick has since died, but those who knew him recognize him in Miller’s paintings and share what they know: He was shy and gentle, and rode his bike everywhere.
“That’s Nick, and now he’s on a birdhouse,” Miller said.
At about 13 inches tall, the birdhouses – built by the museum’s exhibit preparer, John Richardson – are simply designed: shed roof, one hole big enough for birds but too small for predators. The bottoms can be removed for cleaning.
They were designed for inhabitation. But they’ve become works of art, Smith said, more suitable for indoors than outdoors.
When Smith delivered a blank birdhouse to Harold Balazs, he said, the artist – whose public art dots the region and whose shows draw crowds – warned him that birds don’t like bright colors.
“I said, ‘Harold, if you paint a birdhouse, the last place that it will probably go is outdoors where birds might live in it,’ ” Smith said.