The color of flight
The color of flight
Artist Christopher Reiger gives us a whole new way to see the birds of the Laguna de Santa Rosa
A unique art exhibit just opened at Heron Hall at the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, just east of town. It’s called “A Laguna Field Guide,” and it’s the pandemic brainchild of local artist Christopher Reiger.
Let’s get one thing clear from the start: this is not a traditional field guide in any way, shape or form.
During the pandemic, Reiger became a full-time stay-at-home dad of his two young children, and seeking a creative outlet, he began thumbing through his old journals. He came across a notation that read simply “paint chip versions of birds,” and he said he thought to himself, “There’s a good germ of an idea there.”
You can see that idea in full flower in the exhibit at Heron Hall. Each poster in the exhibit describes a different species of bird that you might see in the laguna in terms of its color alone, reducing each to a simple column of colors that expresses each bird in terms of the number and percentage of colors in its plumage.
“I wanted it to be both design-oriented—a nod to some of the great artists who've really looked at color and value and tone like Josef Albers—but also I wanted to create a rigorous method that I could apply to each bird to create these color columns.”
To figure out the colors and percentages, Reiger finds dozens of pictures of a certain type of bird in profile and creates a histogram of its plumage.
“A histogram is a graph of frequency distributions; it's often used as a tool for research (especially when scientists publish their results), but it can also be used by photographers and designers (in the context of programs such as Photoshop) to determine the exact percentages of color in an image,” he said.
He produces the columns of color digitally, printed in ink on archival paper.
Each column is organized so that the color which dominates the bird in profile comes at the top, with the lowest percentage color at the bottom.
“Say it's a robin. In profile, you're going to see mostly some of the brown and some chestnut from the back. So the top two highest percentages are going to be closer to the top of the column, then you're going to get that famous robin redbreast. And then you work down to the eye color, which will be a tiny percentage of the bird’s color. The toenails can sometimes be a slightly different color than the beak, so you might have these very thin bands of color at the column’s base.”
The number of colors varies as well.
“Some birds have five or six bands of color,” he said, while others are more monochromatic. “The Raven might have four or five different blacks, but other birds, like the morning dove, I think I had 19 bands of color for that one.”
Though it’s a far cry from a traditional field guide, Reiger said that “Some people who are really big bird nerds like to look at them without seeing what the bird is and try to identify it—some are more obvious than others—but I've seen some people do very well doing that.”
Reiger said he has put himself on schedule to produce and release one poster a week. He has now released 100 posters. Eventually, he hopes to have 250 to 500 posters.
Twenty of these posters are on exhibit at the Laguna Foundation, and they’re well worth seeing.
You can see the posters and meet the artist at two upcoming events:
Opening Reception for “A Laguna Field Guide” by Christopher Reiger
Saturday, Jan. 21, 3 to 5 pm at Heron Hall at the Laguna Environmental Center, 900 Sanford Road, Santa Rosa. Free. Light refreshments provided. Find out more.
A Laguna Field Guide: An Artist's Take On Taxonomy – a talk with Christopher Reiger
Saturday, Jan. 28, 4 to 5:30 pm at Heron Hall at the Laguna Environmental Center, 900 Sanford Road, Santa Rosa. $10. Christopher Reiger will present a slide talk that provides more backstory about the Field Guide project's origins, as well as the project's celebration and critique of taxonomy. Register for this event here.
