Description
‘Kingfisher’ – The Book of Birds
“Kingfisher’s blue blaze burns air, sears sky…..”
Limited Edition Giclée Print with hand applied ‘gold’ leaf in an edition of 75
Signed by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane including a handwritten quotation from The Book of Birds
on 300gsm Canson Moulin du Roy 100% cotton rag
Image 47.5 cm x 40.5 cm
Mounted and unframed 64.5 cm x 58.5 cm
Collect from gallery £675
Including UK delivery £700
Comes with a Certificate of Authenticity
Each print is created, examined, passed and embossed with a seal to confirm the publisher’s approval.
Edition 31/75
A great thinning of the skies is underway. Around 50 per cent of bird species are in decline worldwide. Our dawns and springs are quieter each year than the last. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost. It does not have to be this way –– but we will not save what we do not love. The Book of Birds is a compendium of forty-nine bird species, from Avocet to Yellowhammer, all of which are presently declining or
endangered in Britain. Inspired by the classic bird-books with which theauthors grew up, this is a field guide with a difference. It asks not, ‘What is that bird?’, but ‘Who is that bird?’ It shows its readers how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.
With lyrical precision and playfulness, Robert Macfarlane evokes each bird’s habits and habitats –– their patterns of flight and of song, how they hunt and gather, how they nest and raise their young, the stories and myths which attend them, the threats which shadow them, and how their wild lives intersect with our own. And on every page, we encounter Jackie Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted in watercolour and gold and animated by an extraordinary attention to detail and sense of life.
Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky.
Jackie was born in Birmingham in 1961. Her family moved to Evesham when she was four. As a child she was told that she couldn’t be an artist, but despite this information being drilled into her by teachers she decided to throw caution to the wind and learn to paint.
“Here I grew up and remember little of those times. I do know that from at least the age of six I wanted to be an artist. I watched my dad drawing a picture of a lapwing, making a bird appear on a piece of paper using only a pencil, and I thought it was some magic that made this happen. So there and then I decided to learn how to conjure birds from paper and colour.”
She found success at the Bath Academy of Art. On leaving college she found work in editorial, illustrating magazines like Radio Times, New Statesman, New Society and Country Living. She worked for years illustrating books and in 2016, she was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for Something About a Bear. The book includes her water colours of different types of bear.
She now lives in a small house by the sea in Wales, painting and writing and dreaming and proving her teachers wrong. But, all said and done there are times when she would rather have followed her first ambition, which was to be a bear.
