Maggie Robertson discovered her ornithological inclinations as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when a professor assigned her class to draw bird specimens at The Field Museum. “That’s how I fell in love with them,” she says. “You’re in these huge rooms with rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling lockers. You pull out any one of the drawers, and there’s hundreds of beautiful birds.”
Years later, with a grant from the Regional Arts Commission, she returned to Chicago to photograph and then paint the birds of Missouri. She then decided to print some of the photos from the museum itself.
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When Robertson first saw a black-hooded oriole preserved in one of the drawers in Chicago’s Field Museum, she knew she had to turn the bird into art. “He looked so noble in his repose,” she recalls.
The specimen became a photograph, then a Photoshop experiment in kaleidoscopic imagery. Now, it’s the central figure in a pillow backed in velvet and piped in cording. If yellow doesn’t work in your décor, don’t fret; Robertson has created blue, pink, and orange pillows from other birds. Tea towels, découpage-and-glass trays, pocket squares, and scarves, as well as smaller pillows, round out the collection. Robertson sells the line under her Magpie Design Studio.
How’d you start designing the pillows? I started designing kaleidoscopes, using my imagery chopped up and Photoshopped. They’re printed on satin specifically because the satin brings out the iridescence in the feathers. It conveys that play of light through their feathers the best. I like how abstract they are; I think most people wouldn’t immediately assume what they are. They’re drawn to the colors and the design, and then they can get more into it when they realize what it is.
Why do you paint birds with the collection tags? The tags are critical. Aesthetically, the tags are unique. They convey in and of themselves so much information about each individual bird. They create an abstract quality to the photography. The birds are very organic, and then the tags add this linear, geometric aesthetic to the visual. Some of the bird specimens are 200 years old. That’s really fascinating to me as well, and amazing.
The goal of your paintings is to raise awareness. Of what? Three main points: declining bird species population, the importance of the continued collections, beauty—simply put. Even though they’re dead birds and some people are put off by that, they have a lot of importance and value in their death, in their collection. They’re not grotesque in any way; they’re not like roadkill. They’re very clean and aesthetically beautiful to me—and to many other people, I’ve found.
What’s next for you? I’m looking for funding to try to get these photographs printed the way they should be, which is large. I plan to exhibit the paintings; I plan on exhibiting the photographs once I get those printed. In the meantime, I’ve been playing with the imagery anyway. I had no idea that this line would result from that original idea. The housewares, the pocket squares, and all that sorta stuff was totally something that grew out of a whole other idea.
Do you plan to keep exploring your bird collection? Absolutely. There’s a wealth of imagery to mine and grow with. I didn’t know I was going to be a bird painter, but it turns out that it is fascinating to me.
Where would you like to see your work a few years from now? In Bergdorf Goodman. [She laughs.] That’s where I’d like to see it. Aim high.
To commission an order from Robertson, email her at [email protected].
