Sam Print

My father was a bird man. We had a cockatoo and an African Grey parrot in the house where I grew up. Lots of storers came out of having a wild bird, the cockatoo and a cussing African Grey in the house. My father had a sculpture of an eagle on his desk. I always saw that as a representation of him. At his retreat there were nesting eagles that he would show people, careful not to disturb them. After he passed, during his memorial at the retreat, three eagles flew by. These I saw as representing his three grown children. So when I was asked to do a painting for a show of contemporary artist’s take on the work of James Audubon, I wanted to do the eagle. A mistaken text was sent to me saying I had the flamingo. I wasn’t interested in the flamingo. So much pop representation and over the top beauty, I thought the bird was over done. But when I looked up the flamingo in The Birds of America, the color and strangeness of the bird struck me. This illustration of Audubon was done before the flamingo was interpreted as kitsch and at the time few people had see one. I decided to rebrand the flamingo as the strange and primitive creature that it is. After it was finished I was told that I did in fact have the eagle and that someone else had the flamingo. I made my rendition of the Golden Eagle and that led me to do a series on birds. Among them, our cockatoo and African grey; my wife’s childhood bird, Binky; her best friend’s bird, Johnny Ka Bong Pong; a bird that rides the F train in San Francisco, and an ornery Turkey that terrorized Downtown Davis known as Downtown Tom.