Bone Feathers /  by Chris Maynard

Each of the bird’s flight feathers is attached to the wing bone. You know how a bird folds its wings to its body when it lands? And how a feather spreads out evenly when it opens its wings to fly? There is a ligiment that runs the entire way along the forward edge of the wing so the feathers spread out evenly when the bird opens its wings.

It is not only feathers that make a bird fly. They are only the most obvious. The entire bird’s body is adapted for flying—like lite and hollow bones and the way the bones are shaped to attach the muscles. Birds also have special ways of breathing to assist in powering muscles for flight. They have skeletons where much of the back bones fused as one to help keep them stable during flight. As such, their bodies are sort of football shaped. To have flexibility, they have long necks with perhaps three times as many vertebrae as us. They have no teeth, that would be too heavy. Instead they have bills made out of keratin, the same substance that their feathers are made of but arranged in a very different way.

The Perfect Feather /  by Chris Maynard

A perfect feather can be hard to find. Birds wear their feathers for about a year before they they grow new ones and shed the old, so of course shed feathers are worn. These shed Mountain Peacock Pheasants are often notoriously too messed up for my art. I can try to preen them with my fingers to get them in better shape. But of this whole pile of feathers, I found only two that I could possibly use.

Feather Wall Installations /  by Chris Maynard

Much of my work has been contained in shadowboxes with museum acrylic protection. But the work is durable enough for wall installations which I have been doing more of this year. This work was installed in the Beverly Hills area of Los Angeles during the 2025 January fires!

Feather Support /  by Chris Maynard

Katrina von Gruow wrote and illustrated The Unfeathered Bird in which she arranged birds without skin and often only the bones into poses of activity like flight. She agreed for me to stylize some of her illustrations into carved feathers. After all, this is what is underneath all those feathers that allows the bird to power flight.

Although we don't often see them because they live over open ocean, the small Wilson's Storm Petrel is among the most abundant of birds. They flutter about like butterflies, not so much landing on the water but dancing with their feet on the surface of the wave troughs. 

This Bird Sheds More Than Feathers /  by Chris Maynard

Top: Grouse foot in summer. Bottom: Grouse foot in winter

Grouse have these millipede-like growths in the winter, presumably to act like snowshoes. In the spring, they are shed in a yearly molt like the bird sheds its feathers every year. Only the toe growths don’t grow back until the next fall. I probably won’t be doing anything with them like I do with shed feathers!

A limit as a Creative Prompt /  by Chris Maynard

Split Moon, Crowned Crane secondary wing feather

Ideas and inspirations come through many channels. It isn’t the artist doing it but being open up to possibilities and being part of a conduit. Feathers though, present a challenge because they only come in the natural colors and sizes that the bird grows

So the feathers as my medium set severe limits. When I am inspired, I have to figure out how to accomplish an inspiration using only feathers as my line, form, color and size. So I need to approach this type of design problem from many angles. I sketch many possible ideas knowing most of them will not work. It is kind of like a brain storm in my sketchbook

Phoenix Flamingo /  by Chris Maynard

Female Red-tailed Cockatoo tail feather carved into the likeness of a Phoenix

The family name for Flamingoes is Phoenicopterae, from the word phoenix.

It makes sense in a way because these birds live in fire, sort of. They inhabit environments that are too extreme for any other bird or mammal. They gather and breed in super salty and alkaline environments that would quickly kill other creatures. They can drink very hot water, close to boiling. As Katrina von Gruow writes in The Unfeathered Bird, “Flamingoes are really very special birds indeed and, with their carmine wings, emerging from the intense chemical heat of the tropical salt lakes, certainly worthy of the name “phoenix".”

A Tongue in the Shape of a Feather /  by Chris Maynard

Look at this Toucan’s tongue! A feathered bird with a feathery tongue. A toucan’s beak can be as long as its body and comes with a tongue to match. The bird seems to use it as a tool to get sticky food down its throat as well as to taste the food before deciding to swallow it or not.

Creative Inspiration in a Feather /  by Chris Maynard

Sunrise study #1

An artist gets inspiration from many sources: other artists, the natural world, animals, people, and many others. I got this inspiration from the top feather. To me, it was so obviously like a sunrise that it practically dictated this piece. That’s the thing about perfect natural feathers, am not going to paint a sunset on a feather because I want to honor the natural color. Both feathers are from an Amazon Parrot, about five inches long so the final piece is only 5 x 7 inches.

Raven Spins the World /  by Chris Maynard

Raven Spins the World, 13 x 21 inches using Great Argus feathers

We make stories as an important way of making sense of the world and take them seriously even though they are never perfect reflections of reality. Like when someone tailgates me, I think “they are doing this on purpose to bother me” when most likely the tailgater either has a bad habit or is just absorbed with getting somewhere. It probably has nothing to do with intentionally trying to bother me.

This seriousness about our stories partly why I like to make up stories that are not so serious. Like this title which could be part of a larger story.

The Axolotl, Feathered Lungs /  by Chris Maynard

I’m attracted to feathery shapes and feather analogies. While a bird’s feathers allow the bird to live in two mediums: on land and in the air; the Axolotl’s feathery gills allow them to live their lives in the water even though they also have lungs and can breathe air like us. These creatures lived in a couple of lakes near Mexico City but now they are mostly gone. However, they are easily bred and genetically manipulated so are abundant in the pet trade. Unlike feathers, these frilly fills are never shed so I wouldn’t use them in my art!

PBS Documentary, Dancing, and Creativity /  by Chris Maynard

About 21 minutes into this almost hour-long documentary, PBS placed an eight-minute section about my art. The best part about it for me and also the most vulnerable, is toward the end when they filmed me dancing in my studio. I do love to dance as it comes closest to capturing a feeling of flight. This feeling of movement is important in my art and it can translate to a feeling of motion in the final pieces that I make.

Pelicanesis /  by Chris Maynard

Pelicanesis

What if we can attract things like food by some unseen power like telekinesis?

Life offers two features in abundance: beauty and horror. For me, I find an underlying theme of humor provides some balance. People often say that my pieces have a bit of comedy. I don’t usually try for humor, but I like it when a piece makes me smile. Especially when the title fits.

Bright Feather Colors /  by Chris Maynard

Greetings in its frame. For my smallest pieces I loved these bumpy frames but they were discontinued. Now I use a silver-lined black frame.

Bright colors are rare in feathers, especially large ones. It is at least partly ok for the birds to show their colors because they feel safe – which is because they can fly and get away, unlike mice who are always dull grey or brown. Imagine a mouse with these bright colors! It might be popular in the pet trade but the mice would not last long in the wild.

Want to fly? /  by Chris Maynard

Disperse is carved from an Amazon Parrot flight feather.

I want to fly because:

I want to fly to fly to have a better view

I want to fly to understand where I want to go

I want to fly to be closer to heaven

I want to fly to be respected

I want to fly to get away from what is bothering me, what I don’t like

I want to fly to get unstuck

I want to fly to go somewhere else because where I am is boring, dangerous, unfulfilling

I want to fly so I can look down on everyone else

I want to fly so I can feel important

I want to fly so I can get what I want--career, physical wholeness, relationship, mental wholeness, physical health, and stuff 

I want to fly so I can be acknowledged, respected, and famous

I want to fly because it is more exciting than being here.

I want to fly so do not have to slog there through brush and hills.

I want to fly to be free

I want to fly because it feels good

 

Pickup Sticks /  by Chris Maynard

Chickadee Pickup Sticks . 23 x 23 inches . Crowned Crane wing feathers

I think of the pleasure I felt playing Pickup Sticks as a child, how the sticks were interconnected and we tried to find ways of disconnecting them one at a time without affecting the rest. When I observe birds, I think about how science works by trying to isolate specific aspects of birds to study. When we separate one thing from everything else, remarkable knowledge can be obtained. But science usually forgets that the sticks are intertwined for complex reasons. I might think I know a chickadee because I know a few things about them, but really? There is so much complexity to how they exist in a huge pile of sticky relations: to each other, to their food, to the sun and moon, to plants and bugs, time and sound, to weather, and on and on. So many interrelations that I end up in awe, not needing to know it all but instead feeling a contentedness at the wonder of existence. 

My Favorite Binoculars /  by Chris Maynard

My favorite binoculars are 9 x 32 millimeters. That means the bigger 32 mm lens in front makes the binoculars small enough to carry around but still catch enough light for most situations. Otherwise, if the binoculars were bigger, like a standard 42 mm lens, I would think twice about packing them up. The 9 mm magnification gets a little more detail than the standard 8mm magnification. They are under $300. which was not too big a hit for me having left my last pair in a taxi. The optics are sharp but not quite as sharp as a $2000 high-end binocular. They are made by Pentax.

When I have my binoculars in hand looking at birds is when I get a lot of inspirations for my art, including this piece, Feather Binoculars.

How To See Through Your Own Reflection? /  by Chris Maynard

Osprey Sees Its Through Own Reflection

When I try to see into the water, mostly I get my own reflection. But if I spend some time trying to look past that, I begin to notice what is below, however indistinctly. So it is all the more remarkable to see an osprey dive to get a fish when for me, it would be hard to quickly see past the surface reflection, especially as I got closer to the surface of the water. That is, unless I was wearing glare-cutting polarized glasses.

Have you ever seen an osprey dive into the water? It emerges dripping wet and flies off, giving occasional shakes like a wet dog.

Ornithology /  by Chris Maynard

This large piece represents about one-tenth of all the bird families in the world. Carved into each feather is a bird or birds from a different family. The left row shows more or less the earliest existing birds to evolve; the right row shows the latest. The top row of cut out birds are loosely the highest flyers, the bottom row are the lowest.

This was commissioned by a natural history museum in late 2017 so the piece has a lined-up row feeling of a museum specimen collection.