Birding Inspires Painter to Save Eagles through Art

By Daisy Yuhas, Audubonmagazine.org
February 15, 2012

The Greater Philippine Eagle, painted by David Tomb

It was a moment that changed everything. David Tomb had journeyed nearly 7,000 miles to see this bird —the holy grail of birding— and when finally face-to-face he discovered a creature that was majestic, leonine, and incredibly vulnerable.

The bird was a great Philippine eagle, a massive raptor with a seven foot wingspan and mane of feathers. An impressive predator, the powerful bird of prey was once called the “Monkey-Eating Eagle,” and today human activity has reduced its numbers to about 200 individuals in the wild.

Tomb, an artist who returned to his first love — birds — after twenty years of human portraiture, travelled to the Philippines in 2011. He and a group of birding buddies found themselves moved in an unprecedented way when they encountered the Philippine eagle not in the wild but in a hospital run by the Philippine Eagle Foundation. There, they watched as the majestic animal, recovering from surgery after suffering gunshot wounds and a wing amputation, awakened from anesthesia.

“We went into the recovery room and there it was: One of the biggest eagles in the world, wrapped in bandages,” Tomb says. “Its eyes were blinking and it just started to chirp… It was this incredibly awesome creature that was so incredibly vulnerable.”

Discussing the experience with his travel companions, Tomb decided he wanted to do more than just witness these amazing animals, he wanted to save them. With friends Peter Barto and Howard Flax, Tomb founded the nonprofit Jeepney Projects Worldwide to use art as a way to raise awareness of high-priority conservation birds, their habitats, and support their survival.

The group takes a creative approach to their mission. Tomb draws viewers into the experience of seeing birds in their habitat with a multi-sensory gallery experience. Live plants hint at the scent of the outdoors. An interactive soundscape, designed by johnnyrandom’s Flip Baber, follows the viewer through the gallery, immersing the viewer in the eagle’s world with calling macaques, blowing breezes, and bird song.

The experience is meant to captivate, raising awareness of a the endangered eagle and importance of saving its habitat. Tomb uses art as an entry point to dicuss the bird’s plight and the work of the center in preserving habitat, rehabilitating birds, and empowering local communities whose poverty puts pressure on the eagle’s habitat. Tomb also sells benefit prints through the website to raise funds for both the Philippine Eagle Foundation and another key bird habitat, El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico.

“It’s so gratifying to utilize art work, to make art work of something you love and put it towards something you love,” says Tomb. “And to have it work.”

So far, Tomb notes, responses have grown with every retelling of the eagle’s story. In the year since the project’s creation, Tomb has created several original prints and already sold twenty. Tomb also hopes that as awareness of the Philippine Eagle grows, more people will learn about sustainability and how the demand for Philippine Mahogany has pushed the bird’s numbers down, causing massive deforestation.

Below are two more of Tomb’s paintings, and you can click this link to listen in to a soundscape depicting the eagle’s habitat (hint: you can run it on a separate tab while viewing the paintings here). For those near Berkeley, California, you can see Tomb’s work on display at The Bone Room through February 29, and his work will also be displayed this June at San Francisco’s Electric Works.

Paintings above and below by David Tomb

While growing up on an Oakland hillside, artist David Tomb — his last name is pronounced “Tom” as in “Tom Sawyer” — was interested in both art and birds. “I’m not sure which interest came first,” he muses. The home where Tomb grew up was filled with landscape paintings by his grandfather, the California Impressionist Sydney Lemos (1892 – 1944), and he remembers being fixated on the texture of a painted redwood tree in one of them. On the other hand, there were often turkey vultures sunning themselves in an oak tree behind the house, and they were at least equally fascinating.

“I was a bird nerd kid,” says Tomb. Accordingly, he spent many hours with his nose in vintage bird books including the field guides of Roger Tory Peterson (1908 – 1996), and numerous illustrated books by the American ornithologist and artist Luis Agassiz Fuertes (1874 – 1927). Fine art was a kind of parallel fascination, and although 18-year-old Tomb did a few bird drawings at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, art was about something else; at least it started out that way.

David Tomb

While attending Cal State Long Beach as an undergraduate, Tomb studied drawing with John Lincoln, who in turn was a student of the figurative expressionist Rico Lebrun (1900 – 1964). Not surprisingly, Tomb also used the figure as his main artistic vehicle. After earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1984, Tomb returned to the Bay Area where his work consisted mostly of portraits, including many of friends who would drop by his studio.

As a portraitist, Tomb demonstrated tremendous persistence, developing a practice in which drawing played a key role. “Tomb uses his subjects’ appearance to get his hand going, not as inroads to their character,” is how critic Kenneth Baker put it. In one memorable sequence executed between 1985 and 1991, Tomb, who does not do commissioned portraits, made several hundred drawings and about 50 paintings of “Richard,” a high school friend. Writer Bruce Nixon detected in Tomb an artist who was “…always testing the breadth and depth of what he knows or is willing to consider.” Another key aspect of Tomb’s artistic approach — which counterbalances the artist’s hesitations with his moments of clarity — is that he clearly wants his viewers to join him in the arduous process of “scrutinization.” To put it another way, Tomb is an engaged artist who encourages engaged viewing.

Although a few images of birds cropped up in some of his paintings of the late ’80s, Tomb avoided using them as primary subject matter, despite his continuing hobby of “birding.” Because he is “not a fan of pet birds,” Tomb remained unsure how he might properly observe them, and render their particulars. Then, in 2004, several friends simultaneously challenged him: “David, when are you going to do bird paintings?” Realizing that he had been given a “signal,” Tomb tentatively returned to the California Academy of Sciences, and got a pleasant surprise as he began to again draw specimen birds. “I had a great time,” he recounts. “Eventually those studies became the basis of birds in paintings. It all came together naturally.”

With “birder” friends, Tomb had begun making pilgrimage to seek out rare specimens in their native habitats. In the early ’00s there were trips to Mexico and South America, and by 2008 Tomb had begun to publicly exhibit bird-themed works beginning with an exhibition titled “Treasures of the Sierra Madre: Birds of West Mexico.”

In January of 2011, Tomb set off on a trip that was was a life-changing experience: a visit to the Philippine island of Mindanao to observe the Philippine Eagle. Spurred by the lingering impressions made by plates of the “Philippine Monkey-eating Eagle,” in his childhood copy of Eagles of the World, Tomb was hoping to experience what he characterizes as “one of the most coveted of all bird sightings.”

The Philippine Eagle is considered critically endangered, with as few as 200 adult birds now surviving in four island habitats. Tomb’s expedition took him to the southern island of Mindanao, then to the city of Cagayan de Oro, then to the tiny village of Dapitan where his gear was loaded onto water buffalo for the trek up a muddy gully to the lodge — a “funky old shack with bats and rats.”

On the first day of birdwatching all that Tomb and his friends saw was rain, but on the second day eagles appeared. Huge, shaggy brown and white birds with distinctive crests — Tomb says the crests remind him of lion’s manes — the eagles can weigh as much as 18 pounds. It was a “huge thrill” to see the birds, Tomb says, comparing the experience to “…going to Rome and seeing a Caravaggio; a beautiful special thing of rarity.”

David Tomb, “Great Philippine Eagle,” 16¾ × 22½ inches. Archival digital limited edition print from an original watercolor/gouache

Then, after a successful quest for beauty, Tomb took in the downside. The Philippine Eagle, which Tomb describes as “iconic, like the panda or the tiger,” might not be around much longer. Deforestation, the presence of pesticides, mining, development, and poaching are all taking a serious toll. Before leaving the Philippines Tomb visited the Philippine Eagle Foundation in Davao where some 37 eagles — many of which have been injured and cannot return to the wild — are being used in a breeding program. On the night that Tomb’s party arrived a badly wounded adult eagle arrived. It needed emergency surgery to remove one of its wings, and the next morning Tomb’s friend Peter Barto solemnly took video of the giant maimed bird, wrapped in gauze, blinking its eyes as it came out of anesthesia.

Another sobering moment came when the group visited a defunct logging concession near the town of Bislig on Mindanao. There, they came across a vast, open, treeless landscape. The view included “…charred waist high tree stumps of smallish to medium girth and a few random very large stumps of what was the few old growth trees that survived the first clear cutting some forty to fifty years ago.” Tomb’s guide then explained that just a few months before, at the same site, he had observed a very rare Rufous-lored Kingfisher in a healthy second growth forest. “Now there was no Kingfisher and no forest,” Tomb laments.

Upon their return to California, Tomb and his friends reflected on their trip and realized that it had been a call to action. Together with Peter Barto, Howard Flax, and Ian Austin, Tomb set up “Jeepney Projects Worldwide: Art for Conservation,” an organization devoted to raising funds for the Philippine Eagle Foundation, and to educating the wider public about bird conservation in general.

Tomb’s personal webpage now has a section entirely filled with his bird-themed works of the past few years. Spread across the page are paintings of an Eared Quetzal, a Great Kiskadee, an Emerald Toucanet and many other rare creatures. The birds are rendered in stunning detail, and Tomb’s expressive line has tightened up to better suit the realism required by his new subjects. At the very top of the page, reigning like a king, is a Philippine Eagle. More than any other, this particular bird — through its majesty, its rarity, and its beauty — has opened up a new phase in Tomb’s artistic career. Somehow, an artist’s search for rare beauty brought him towards responsibility, a beautiful thing in itself.

Beginning on Feb. 2, Tomb’s installation “The Bone Room Presents” in Berkeley will feature works on paper depicting not only the Great Philippine Eagle but also other rare and beautiful endemic birds of the Philippines, including the Rufous Hornbill. There will be living plants and an audio installation that will highlight sounds of the Mindanao jungle. The exhibition is meant to shine a light on the rare and beautiful birds of the Philippines and also to communicate the challenges and tensions these creatures face in order to survive and share a sustainable future with an ever growing Filipino population.

“Making artwork of the birds is a way to connect and personalize my experience of seeing the birds.” Tomb relates.“The ultimate goal is to have people think: ‘That animal is incredible.’”

***

Jeepney Projects Worldwide: Vanishing Birds of the Philippines

An Exhibition and Installation by David Tomb
Audio by Flip Baber and Johnny Random
Feb. 2 – 29
The Bone Room Presents
1573 Solano Avenue, Berkeley, California
Artist Talk by David Tomb: Thursday, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m.

FOR DEVOTED BIRD watchers, the Great Philippine Eagle is the holy grail of birds, an almost mythological creature they all have at the top of their life list.

“Of the 10,000 birds in the world, it’s the most desired bird to see,” said artist David Tomb, whose watercolor paintings of the Philippine Eagle and other exotic birds are on exhibit through Oct. 29 in an installation at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

Among the largest and most powerful birds in the world, the great eagle is the national symbol of the Philippines. But because of the clear-cutting of hardwood forests and the seemingly inexorable destruction of its natural habitat, the iconic raptor may not be long for this world.

“There are probably only 200 of these eagles left in the wild,” Tomb lamented. “If the Philippine Eagle were to go extinct, it would be like the world losing pandas or tigers.”

The Dominican show is the official launch of Tomb’s Jeepney Projects Worldwide — Art for Conservation, a fledgling organization devoted to using the power of art to support regional conservation groups working to restore and protect the habitat of critically endangered birds like the Philippine Eagle.

Sales from the Dominican show will benefit the Philippine Eagle Foundation, an organization in the Philippine city of Davao with a captive breeding program similar to the one that saved the California Condor.

In January, Tomb and a group of friends visited the center after he fulfilled the dream of a lifetime, viewing wild Philippine Eagles on Mt. Kitanglad on the Philippine island of Mindanao.

“It took us a day and a half to see the birds,” he said. “We got a big bounce out of that.”

The threatened demise of the Philippine Eagle is particularly alarming for Tomb, a 50-year-old San Rafael High and College of Marin graduate now living and working in San Francisco’s Mission district. He’s been fascinated by the magnificent raptor since he was an 11-year-old Marin kid with a passion for birds.

“Its name used to be the Philippine monkey-eating eagle, which really caught my attention when I was a boy,” he recalled. “With its huge manelike crest, it looks like a lion with wings.”

Growing up, he participated in the Audubon Society’s annual bird counts and was inspired by Point Reyes Bird Observatory naturalist Rich Stallcup, who’s considered “the godfather of California birding.”

“I wanted to be just like him,” Tomb remembered.

After graduating from California State University Long Beach with a bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing, Tomb worked for 20 years as a portrait artist as well as an illustrator for the New Yorker, Harpers and other publications. His work is shown at Electric Works gallery in San Francisco.

Since 2005, he has devoted himself to his boyhood love — painting birds he sees on expeditions to Mexico and Ecuador in addition to the Philippines.

With Marin residents Peter Barto and Howard Flax, two friends since middle school, and Ian Austin of San Anselmo, he formed the Jeepney Project a year ago to market his art in the service of wildlife conservation.

Their organization’s namesakes are the World War-II vintage U.S. military jeeps the resourceful Filipinos have transformed into colorfully decorated taxis, now lighthearted Philippine cultural icons.

“I thought the jeepney was a great connection to the Philippines and our first big project,” Tomb explained. “And being an artist from California, you always have this thread of funk art and collage. And these jeepneys are totally funky collages.”

The Dominican installation, presented by the university’s department of art, art history and design, features some 45 paintings and drawings in a setting of tropical plants and natural sounds that mimic a Philippine forests.

“Being on a college campus, students can see how a conservation concept and an art project can merge together and develop,” he explained. “They aren’t seeing finished art work in a fancy gallery. They can see that this conservation idea just started and this art work is in process. It’s exciting that something positive can be done in terms of conservation with art work. This is the time to act.”

IF YOU GO

What: Jeepney Projects Worldwide installation by David Tomb
When: Through Oct. 29; Sept. 22: reception 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 26: artist talk 1:30 to 3 p.m.
Where: Dominican University of California, San Marco Gallery, 50 Acacia Ave., San Rafael
Admission: Free
Information: 485-3269; www.dominican.edu

San Francisco-based artist David Tomb has loved birds since he was a young boy.

“I grew up in Oakland, Calif., and had some friends who were bird-watchers,” he said. “So we used to go out and look for owls and hawks.”

Tomb said he was also interested in art at the same age—so it’s no surprise that he became intrigued by bird artists. It’s also no surprise that winged creatures are the theme of his current exhibit, Borderland Birds, now showing at the Tucson Botanical Gardens’ Porter Hall Gallery.

More…

For other information, please visit www.boneroompresents.com.

John Seed interviewed David Tomb about this show for an article published in the Huffington Post on January 23, 2012. Many thanks for helping to publicize the cause, John!

]]> http://davidtomb.com/2011/06/jeepney-projects-worldwide-vanishing-birds-of-the-philippines/feed/ 0 http://davidtomb.com/2011/06/huffington-post-%e2%80%94-frank-lobdell-%e2%80%9cnothing-worth-anything-is-easy%e2%80%9d/ http://davidtomb.com/2011/06/huffington-post-%e2%80%94-frank-lobdell-%e2%80%9cnothing-worth-anything-is-easy%e2%80%9d/#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:25:53 +0000 admin http://davidtomb.com/?p=256 Original Article

by John Seed Professor of art and art history, Mt. San Jacinto College
Feb 10, 2011

Portrait of Frank Lobdell, by David Tomb 49.25" x 29.25" mixed media on paper 2002

When David Tomb created his mixed-media portrait of artist Frank Lobdell in 2002, the experience left him wrung out. Working “on the spot” in Lobdell’s San Francisco studio, Tomb recalls that he was “so nervous, actually, that when I went home my neck went into massive seizure — doctors, painkillers, therapy for several months.”

In his effort to create a psychologically accurate portrait of a veteran painter known for his verbal reticence and monastic studio practices, Tomb had taken on a tough subject. Just what is going on, he had to wonder, in the mind of a man whose art is a perplexing mix of the inchoate and the fantastic? Looking at Lobdell’s paintings is always bracing; trying to unravel his psyche is apparently exhausting.

With his considerable effort, Tomb got Lobdell right: the strong jaw, the glowering intelligence, the unease at being scrutinized. Lobdell was “very pleased with the result” says Tomb. Of course he was: Frank Lobdell has a high respect for art that comes out of struggle and pain. Robbie Conal, who had Lobdell as his graduate advisor at Stanford in the late ‘70s says that “Frank would mutter at me, sometimes wearily, sometimes conspiratorially, every time we were together for more than half an hour; ‘Nothing worth anything is easy.’”

I also studied with Lobdell — I was an undergraduate art major around the same time that Robbie Conal was a grad student, and I remember not knowing exactly what to make of Lobdell. He was a man of few words who was hard to get to know. He made a similar impression on my classmate John Littleboy:

He [Lobdell] was broad and heavy-set and usually had a stubbled two-day growth of beard. He seemed to always have on a polo shirt and dark slacks. He might have been an athlete in his youth though that’s just a guess. I took him for independent study so we saw each other infrequently. When we did, speaking seemed to be difficult for him, requiring a big physical effort to articulate his thoughts. I never doubted he wanted to be clearly understood, but that wasn’t an easy business.

At the beginning of my semester with Lobdell I had it in my mind to try and copy a 17th century Poussin mythological painting, “Echo and Narcissus.” Thinking that it was my duty as a figurative painter to try and copy the work of a French master, I carefully sketched in the figures on a grid and had been at work for days before I found Lobdell standing beside my palette table. “Why” he asked, “would you want to paint that?” That was all he had to say, and I remember thinking “That is one great question.”

I had never seen any of Frank’s paintings, and a bit later in the term I dropped by his office hour thinking he might have one of his canvasses hung in his office. Lobdell was lost in some paperwork when I got there, so I looked around and waited. On the right hand wall was an early Diebenkorn abstract oil — it was a terrific painting — but there were no Lobdells in sight. “This man has a rich history,” I began to realize, “that is worth looking into.”

After my Poussin copy went into the dumpster I tried an abstract picture, and it quickly turned into a chaotic mess. When Frank stopped by to see what I was painting I complained to him and pointed out all of the areas that I thought were unresolved. He got right to the point: “Find an area of the painting that you like,” he told me. “I will be back in an hour.” I followed his instructions, and when he returned I located one area of the painting where the paint had accidentally fallen into place in an interesting way. “Hang on to that,” Lobdell advised.

One of Lobdell’s strengths, I gradually learned, was his ability to break down a canvas, scrutinize small areas and understand how they could add up. Susan Harby, who studied under Lobdell as a graduate student, also noticed this strength:

He lived and painted a micro and macroscopic life on the canvas of forms playing out a drama or game. He looked at my work for the interaction of the small things that added up to make a good painting. He would stand inches away from the painting’s surface investigating the small forms or small brushmarks and discuss how they enlivened the surface. They had to add up to something: something truthful.

In this struggle for artistic veracity Lobdell could work up a temper. He was quiet and kind in class, but in his studio he would cut loose. One Saturday I had a job cleaning up Nathan Oliveira’s studio in an old VFW building in Palo Alto. Lobdell and Keith Boyle, another Stanford art professor, had studios across the hall. I remember hearing a crashing sound from across the hall — “Was that a painting hitting the wall?” I wondered — followed by Lobdell’s voice screaming out a string of curses.

Oliveira once told me that he and Frank liked to share some whiskey at the studio from time to time, and one memorable evening they drank half a bottle and realized that the liquor had unlocked their tongues. Nathan turned on a tape recorder to preserve the profound revelations about art that were unfolding, but when he ran the tape a few days later. The results were hilariously disappointing.

“When I make art,” Nathan heard his drunken voice intone, “I…(long silence)…………”

“YESSSSSS,” Lobdell assented solemnly.

Robbie Conal, also remembers spending time in Frank’s studio, talking art over a few drinks:

We’re sitting at what might have been a folding card table, whatever’s left of a 5th of bourbon between us: I brought it. Ruminating — deeply — until Frank growls, “Let’s listen to some Beethoven; the late quartets.”

He gestures me over to the record player. I turn it on and drop the arm on spinning black vinyl.

Frank booms, “Opus 131 in C# minor!” We listen for maybe 10-12 minutes in silence, he’s nodding his head, eyes closed. Then, seemingly from within his reverie he says, “I know people think my work isn’t pretty… that it doesn’t go with the damn drapes… but when I need something for my soul — not for fucking entertainment, you know? — for my soul… I go to Beethoven! That’s what my damn art is about.”

At the end of the term Lobdell invited my class to visit his studio — an exciting moment. He was genuinely liked, even loved, by his students, and we had passed the hat and bought him a large stainless steel frosting knife that we thought would make a good painting tool. Frank loved the knife — it was the most gigantic palette knife ever — and was visibly touched when he unwrapped it.

At his studio that day, Lobdell gave the single most riveting painting demonstration I have ever seen. Placing a canvas flat on the floor, Jackson Pollock style, he scraped some raw oil paint onto the surface and said approvingly “That’s a start.” In the studio, it was as if we students had disappeared: he was letting us into the privacy of his creative process.

“Hmm…… (silence)…..green…… needs yellow.” Each time he laid down some paint, it suggested his next move, and each addition was grudgingly, tentatively applied. At first I remember thinking that Lobdell was intuitive, but as I watched the demonstration unfold it hit me: he was counterintuitive. Every scab of paint demanded a response, but the key was that the response had to be strained and unexpected. Lobdell was a tense painter, and it was the tension of the unexpected that kept him alive to his own work. His demonstration painting, as it began to add up, was simultaneously essay in imperfection and a manifesto of sincerity.

Lobdell was “succinct” says Robbie Conal.

During a one-on-one meeting with Frank, in his studio, after staring at a big new painting of his together for 20 minutes without saying a word, I asked him a question, “How do you get those fast black linear brush strokes in exactly the right place every time?”

The answer, “I paint them slow.”

Lobdell, who told an interviewer in 1960 that “being anonymous is really the best condition to be able to create” was not showing very widely when I knew him, although I do remember him having a small show of monotypes at Galerie Smith Andersen in Palo Alto. Robbie Conal, who served as a Gallery Director for the College of Notre Dame in Belmont in 1979 had to work on Lobdell to convince him to show his 1961 “Summer Mural,” a 20-foot-wide phallic abstraction. “I can’t quite imagine how I managed to trick him into showing the Big Dick,” Conal recalls, “but I somehow talked Frank into unfolding and re-stretching the painting and actually showing it.”

I don’t remember seeing Lobdell at graduation, and in general I think he tried to avoid social situations, and to some degree his students. “He left me an index card with my grade for the quarter on my glass palette” recalls John Littleboy. “ I took by his demeanor that painting wasn’t an easy task and whatever I did should be done with sincerity and dedication.”

Twenty years later, at the opening of an exhibition of The Anderson Collection at San Francisco MOMA, I saw the first Lobdell painting I had seen in more than two decades. A magnificent yellow and blue abstraction titled simply “January, 1971” it more than held its own among the top flight works by Still, Rothko, Pollock and other postwar abstractionists. I looked for Frank to see if I could congratulate him, but was told that he had missed the opening due to hip replacement surgery.

In June 2003, Lobdell’s work popped up again: on the cover of ARTnews magazine. In a feature article titled “The Long Distance Runner” Anneli Rufus wrote this about Lobdell:

Oblivious to art-world trends, Frank Lobdell has spent more than half a century doing what he wants, constantly reinventing himself and finding new territory to explore.

The re-discovery of Frank Lobdell, my stoic painting teacher had begun and the accolades followed. In his introductory essay for the book Frank Lobdell: the Art of Making and Meaning Bruce Guenther writes, “To encounter a Lobdell painting today is to engage at the highest level in a complex dance between structure and symbolism, form and meaning.”

Even more extraordinary than the praise being heaped on Lobdell were the revelations about what he had seen while serving as a GI between 1942 and 1945. In a superb essay also published in Making and Meaning Timothy Anglin Burgard recounts Lobdell’s experience, in April of 1945, of entering a barn in Gardelegen, Germany where Nazi troops had immolated more than 1,000 concentration camp internees. I now fully understand why Lobdell, like many young American painters of the postwar generation, had chosen abstraction over figuration. When you have seen the un-seeable, painting reality becomes excruciating.

When Willem de Kooning painted his epic “Excavation,” an abstracted image of a mass grave, he had only seen news photos of what happened in Germany. Lobdell had seen Hell on Earth with his own eyes, and it chilled his soul. When he created his “Dance” series during the Viet Nam era — inspired by medieval images of the ‘Dance of Death’ — Lobdell’s darkest memories charged the abstract imagery.

“No one who is involved in one of these wars truly survives” Lobdell once told writer Terry St. John.

Lobdell, who will be 90 in August, made an appearance at Hackett-Mill Gallery last month, where he attended the opening of “Frank Lobdell: 1948-49,” an exhibition of a few choice works he made more than 60 years ago. Jessica Phillips, the Associate Director of the gallery reports that Lobdell “enjoyed seeing the work and speaking with collectors and of course former students.” Part of Lobdell’s legacy is certainly his influence of generations of art students: he taught at the California School of Fine Arts from 1957 until taking a job at Stanford where he taught until 1991.

“Frank Lobdell was one of my instructors at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963,” says veteran artist Ronald Davis. “He influenced my student work before I was in his class, and began doing op art. I remember that he told me that, to paraphrase; ‘Sometimes it is not what one puts into a painting, but rather what one leaves out that makes it a compelling picture.’”

Truthfully, part of Lobdell’s power as a man — and as an artist — is that he told us so little for so long. It is energizing, and exhausting, to read between the brushstrokes of a man who meant every word and every brushstroke. He struggled over every single one of them.

Border Troop, 2009, Graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and watercolor wash, 132" x 96" overall, Photo courtesy Electric Works

Between cynicism and hypocrisy lies the 2,000-mile U.S.- Mexico border. America is raising a wall in the desert to separate Mexican drug exporters from American drug consumers, to separate Latin American peasants who will work for low wages from the Americans who would hire them.

The Great Wall of America, straddling less than half the length of the border, descends into canyons and across the desert floor. For the Mexican, it represents a high hurdle. For the American, it is an attempt to stop the Roadrunner’s progress with an Acme Border Sealing Kit.

In some places the wall is made of tennis-court-style cyclone fencing or dark mesh of the sort used for barbeque grills in public parks. In other places the wall is a palisade of 20-foot-tall bars that make a cage of both sides. The most emphatic segments are constructed of graffiti-ready slabs of steel.

On the Mexican side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you will see the poorest neighborhoods, built right up to the line. These frayed, weedy streets have become the killing fields in an international drug war; they are more daunting than the dangers of climbing the wall.

The traditional Mexican accommodation to moral failure — the bribed policeman — has degenerated to lawlessness in places such as Juarez and Tijuana, where police kill federal soldiers who kill police who kill drug gangsters who kill other gangsters of the sort who did kill, apparently with impunity, at least 15 teenagers celebrating a soccer victory. Punch 911 and you get the devil.

On the American side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you will see distance, as the United States recedes from the border. There is a shopping mall with big-box stores half a mile away. There is a highway that eventually leads to suburban streets laid out in uniform blocks, and cul-de-sacs where Mexican gardeners are the only ambulatory human life.

The suburban grid belies America’s disorder. Grandma’s knockoff Louis Vuitton handbag is so full of meds it sounds like a snake rattle. Grandma shares a secret addiction with her drug-addled dude of a grandson, whose dad prowls the Home Depot parking lot in his Japanese pickup, looking to hire a couple of Mexicans to clear out some dry scrub.

In the remotest regions of northern Mexico, the terrain is so treacherous that nature itself forms the wall against America. Desperation moves migrants to attempt ever-more-treacherous terrain to achieve U.S. soil.

In recession America 2010, the lament most often heard is that the middle class is losing its grip on the American dream. (We have redefined the American dream as the ability of a succeeding generation to earn more than its preceding generation.)

On patriotism-for-profit talk radio and television, the illegal immigrant is, by definition, criminal. She comes to steal the American dream. But in my understanding, the dream belongs to the desperation of the poor and always has. The goddess of liberty in New York harbor still advertises for the tired and the poor, the wretched refuse. I tell you, there is an unlucky man in the Sonoran Desert today who will die for a chance to pluck dead chickens in Georgia or change diapers in a rest home in Nevada.

Great empires expand beyond their own borders. Empires in decline build walls.

As it stands, the Great Wall of America is a fraction of the length of the Great Wall of China. China’s dragon-spined ramparts, once a wonder of isolation, are now a draw for tourists, even while China trespasses its own borders to forge the Chinese century. The dragon flies to Africa and to Latin America. While American soldiers die in Afghanistan, the Chinese venture to Kabul to negotiate mineral rights.

The nearer precedent to the American Wall may be Israel’s wall in the West Bank. More than 400 miles long, the Israeli “barrier” — in some places a fence, in others a concrete mass nearly twice the height of the Berlin Wall — was constructed, according to Israeli officials, to deter terrorists. After Sept. 11, the fear one heard in America was that agents of violence from the Middle East might easily disguise themselves as Latin American peasants and trespass into our midst.

What more obvious reason is there for a wall than protection? Any nation should police those who come and go across its borders. But in the United States, as in Israel, the wall has created a new anxiety. Once the wall is in place, anxiety about the coming outsider changes to an anxiety about who belongs within.

The question that has lately been debated in the Knesset is bluntly stated: Who is a Jew? In Israel, the answer to the question concerns religion and citizenship. But it entails further practical considerations. Israel has decided to rid itself of 400 children of illegal foreign workers (some of whom built the West Bank wall), children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew as their mother tongue and know no other country.

The question that has lately been taken up by U.S. senators is bluntly stated: Who is an American? Republicans have proposed excising the part of the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina refers to foreign women who come to this country to “drop” their babies. Graham chooses diction that describes inhuman beasts of burden.

I cannot guess whether this new nativism — though it overrules nativity — is serious business or merely a play for reelection. The irony remains: The land of the free that the wall was built to protect — the literal “homeland,” soil so infused with sacred legend it was deemed by the makers of the Constitution more important than blood in determining citizenship — is threatened from within. And the wall that is supposed to proscribe the beginning of America becomes the place where America ends.

Richard Rodriguez is the author of many books, including “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.” He works for New America Media in San Francisco.

Border Troop, 2009, Graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and watercolor wash 132" x 96" overall, Photo courtesy Electric Works

Barnett Newman’s famous joke about art history being irrelevant to artists, just as ornithology is to birds, has always been irrelevant to ornithologists, even if it ruffled art historians’ feathers. But current events have cast further doubt on its accuracy. Not only does the proliferation of contemporary art require more analysis than ever, but the dwindling avian universe needs professional expertise, too, in warding off extinction. For too long we’ve ignored the canaries in the coal mine–even though some, admittedly, were amphibians, with extra legs.

Portraitist David Tomb may not be a dedicated wildlife artist like Audubon or Fuertes, but he is a dedicated birder who has created mixed-media paintings on paper (complemented by tropical plants, stuffed birds, and recorded birdsong) based on his pilgrimages to bird habitats in Mexico’s Chihuahua, San Blas, Jalisco, and El Triunfo. This show examines the wildlife of northern Mexico, mostly avian, but also pedestrians like the roadrunner and Gila monster. More typical are depictions on medium-sized or large sheets of watercolor paper that place their perched, paused subjects–e.g., aplomado falcon, chachalaca, vermilion flycatcher, great kiskadee, tropical parula, and crimson-collared grosbeak–atop contorted branches and sprays of foliage before blank or blurred backgrounds. The birds are rendered accurately enough to suit any birder, but without the hyperreal detail that Audubon captured, having shot his models–or his anthropomorphic sense of drama. Instead, Tomb depicts moments of stasis–birds caught by the camera and given a larger, eternal context via artistic license, with the artifice occasionally revealed, as in Border Troop, a monumental collage of unretouched fragments, or the single-sheet Ferruginous Pygmy Owl and Green Jays, clearly a composite view. Tomb’s goal in both painting and politics is clearly preservation; he combines art and environmentalism in a way that is accessible both to children, who have flocked to the show with their schoolmates, and to wary, solitary adults working their way down their “life lists” of must-see art.

I love birds. I love everything about them. I love to hear them. I love to see them. I love that they can fly. I love the sound of the word bird. I love Charlie Parker. So when I read that fellow bird lover and painter David Tomb was having a show at Electric Works called Borderland Birds/Aves Fronterizas, I put in my request for an interview. Tomb’s exhibition will consist of drawings and installation and will focus on the birds Montezuma Quail, Aztec Thrush, Aplomado Falcon and the racoon-like coati—all creatures who make the United Sates Southwest and Mexico home–borderland creatures. First thing I wanted to know, of course, is why he loves birds.

“Ringed Kingfisher,” 2009, graphite, watercolor, gouache on paper, 44" x 30"

S.A. Why birds?

D.T. Well, birds are the bees’ knees! They can fly and they are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. What else do you want? I have a memory from childhood that is like a gothic vision. A group of turkey vultures that, every morning, would sun their outstretched wings in a gnarled snag of an oak tree. My mom tells me that I was mesmerized by this. I just think that birds are a beautiful expression of life. A couple of years ago, I was lucky to encounter the ethereal song of the brown-backed solitaire and see a resplendent quetzal flying through a cloud forest canopy with its tail shimmering and undulating. These are very rich aesthetic experiences for me. In terms of art, birds translate well as a decorative and metaphoric motif. Birds are inspiring.

S. A. What can we expect to hear and see at the Electric Works show?

D. T. The works on paper (approximately 14 pieces) in the exhibition will feature a number of birds that can be found, at least part of the year, near the border regions. Specifically the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas and the Sky Islands in Arizona. In addition, there will be one large-scale piece — 11 feet high by 9 feet wide — of a vignette mountain canyon scene with birds and critters. This piece will have a sound component that is triggered by a motion detector. The sounds will be mostly bird songs, a rushing creek, [that sort of thing]. There will also be a selection of desert plants to augment the pictures and sounds. I like this part because you can smell the soil, water, and plants. It adds a lot and helps transport the viewer into another realm.

S.A. Tell me about your grandfather, the painter Sydney Lemos. Any other artists in the family?

D. T. Well, I never got to meet Sydney Lemos, but as a kid I looked at his paintings in our house. Sydney was a very good California Impressionist landscape painter. The bulk of his career was between 1920 and 1944 when he died. He went to the San Francisco Art Institute and was friends with Pedro Lemos (no relation) and Maynard Dixon. Sydney’s parents Mabel and William were both artists in Santa Cruz. William was the big personality raconteur type and he was one of the first vendors at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. William’s sister, who lived in Chicago, was an artist as well. Their parents were both artists also. My mother thinks that one of their parents was an artist as well. OK, back to the future — my brother, Bruce, is an architect/artist and his son, Jason, just got accepted to art school in San Francisco. Whew!

S.A. Why does the U.S./Mexico border fence spell disaster for the environment?

D.T. I can give you two examples of problems that the border fence presents to earthbound creatures. There are natural animal corridors that animals such as the jaguar use to travel north and south through that region. This fence will stop that natural migration for the jaguar, which can result in either complete isolation of this small population of jaguar in the U.S. or the extirpation of this species in the U.S.

In Texas, at Sabal Palm Audubon Center near Brownsville, the construction of the fence will do the same to the ocelot and jaguarundi population. In addition, huge swaths of rich habitat will be clear-cut in all of the areas where the fence is built. This will prevent animal access to the Rio Grande River, which is crucial for their survival. Where the fences are built, there are large denuded areas of land — many creatures will not pass through these areas because they would be too vulnerable to predators — this completely alters the historic environmental landscape.

S.A. That’s ironic that it takes environmentalists and animal rights activists, not human rights activists, to call attention to the wall, which I know isn’t the total truth. Human rights activists have done their part, but still.

D.T. I’m not an expert on this topic but I believe there are plenty of human rights activists and environmentalists [both] that are voicing their concerns regarding this. Obviously, they have not persuaded the key people who can stop or reverse the construction. Here is another disturbing aspect of the fence: It is creepy to look at. This is no ethereal poetic running fence by Christo. It is certainly no meandering, hand hewn, charming, stonewall with ferns and moss tucked away. One glance at this would make anything, furry or otherwise, turn around, run and scream.

S.A. I agree the wall is creepy and it certainly doesn’t address the situation or do anything to lift up the standard of living in Mexico that leads people to risk their lives to come to the U.S. Seems like resources could be better utilized elsewhere.

D.T. There are people that complain about how money is misused or wastefully spent. This should be nearly at the top of the list. Sheesh. I buy coffee from Capulin Coffee, a coffee finca based in West Mexico. The owner once said to me that since his small company employs many of the people in the town/village no one in the town has an interest in getting into the U.S. This is a very small reminder that there are lots of ways one can help the situation.

S.A. Are there any superstitions about birds that you respect? What are some of your favorite bird folklores?

D.T. Of course, birds and culture have long been interwoven. I think it is difficult not to see birds through this prism. Owls are thought to be both wise and mysterious. If you have ever had an up close and personal connection with a great-horned owl you can see in its eyes that this is one shrewd beast. Owls seem to be imbued with an ancient presence that is indescribably powerful.

The way that artists have depicted birds and etched them into culture resonates with me more than a lot of superstitions. I remember as a kid seeing images of the Egyptian God Horus depicted as a falcon-headed man. I just gassed on the stylized look and thinking how cool it was that there was this God that was part falcon. My family went to Vancouver when I was a kid and I saw eagles that were carved into totems. That was so memorable. The Edward Curtis’s staged photos of chiefs with eagle feather headdresses are jaw-dropping pictures — it was obvious that these chiefs also knew that eagles were great! And I spent so much time looking at Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. I loved the simple flat schematic profiles of birds. Much of the appeal of birds is looking at how others have seen them.

There is also the legend of the Tower of London where there are resident ravens and there is even a ravenmaster who takes care of them. The legend says that if the ravens ever leave the towers that the monarchy will fall. It is an amazing image to see the ravens strutting around the towers where traitors and witches were executed — they act like the own the joint. Those bad boys look formidable especially in this context. I find this legend very appealing and I don’t think you have to be in the goth or Dungeons and Dragons crowd to get the sense of wonder here.

S.A. The ravenmaster certainly has a lot of pressure on him. And there are so many bad superstitions about ravens, but the whole British monarchy rests on a few of them. Talk about superstitious.

D.T. Yes, ravenmaster must be a stressful job. I read that he had to make serious provisional plans to protect the birds from the avian influenza.

S.A. Final question: Is there any bird you haven’t seen that you’re chasing down?

D.T. There are so many spectacular birds, but I have started working on an art project to benefit the Philippine Eagle Foundation in Mindanao. The Philippine eagle is critically endangered mostly due to habitat loss/forest destruction but also because of hunting. This is a truly magnificent bird. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has a skin (stuffed) of one of the beauties that I got to study and draw. They’re huge chocolate brown birds with a massive bluish beak and a lion-like mane. I am trying to get a buddy from 7th grade to come along on a research trip to see this gnarly beast. Hey, no pressure, Pete!

The opening reception for Borderland Birds/Aves Fronterizas will be on Friday, April 16th, from 6 to 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The show will be up until May 29, 2010. Electric Works is located at 130 Eighth Street (cross street is Mission). David tells me that ordering coffee from from Capulin Coffee is very easy; he’s never had a problem. You just fill out this simple order form or email them. They’ll contact you for payment information. The coffee gets delivered by FedEx.

Much more information on birds can be found here. Interesting picture of the wall is here. More photos of the border wall, creepy and otherwise, can be found by clicking this. And here is some recent news on the wall. Looks like they are going high tech—less wall, more cameras, laptops and thermal-imaging devices.

“mountain trogon,” graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and water color wash, 42"x30" 2007-2008

I first became aware of artist David Tomb thanks to his portraits some years ago. It was impossible not to recognize something special in them, even beyond the artist’s formidable draftsmanship. In particular, the portraits of his favorite subject capture subtle states one recognizes immediately, most often subtle varieties of preoccupation with one or another unseen riddle. It’s that state of having one’s thoughts quietly elsewhere. Conveyed, too, is the strong sense that we, as viewers, look in on the subject caught unobserved and alone in his pondering. These drawings have a quality hard to pin down, perhaps of a gentle and compassionate impartiality.

Tomb’s portraits have gotten a fair amount of attention, especially here in the Bay Area, and so when I learned that he had turned his attention to a new subject, birds, I was curious. I wanted to know what was behind his new direction.

“Study: chestnut-sided shrike-vireo,” graphite, colored pencil, 13.5"x10" 2006-2007

A phone call led to a studio visit. It was the second or third time I’d met and talked with Tomb, and I was reminded once again just how enjoyable a visit with an artist in his or her studio can be.

What I remember is how Tomb explained that bird watching was one of his longstanding interests, something I can easily understand. Whenever a bird lands in the branches outside the window, aren’t one’s eyes attracted there immediately and linger with a kind of delight? It’s one of those pleasures that never gets old. And sometimes there’s a special treat like the yellow flash of a goldfinch or the charm of a tiny chickadee.

Tomb talked about the rekindling of a passion, and how this carried him to the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. There, he saw first hand an amazing variety of birds he’d never seen before. All in all, it’s clear the artist has given himself over to an entirely new direction.

“Chiapas, resplendent quetzal,” graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and water color wash, 44"x33" 2006-2007

Listening to Tomb’s enthusiastic descriptions raised my own spirits, too. But what about the artworld? I wondered. Tomb’s drawings have the look of accomplished illustrations. Where was the offbeat stance, the conceptual conceit, or some other indication that the work was art?

We both had a rueful laugh over this–a taste of freedom! It seems Tomb wasn’t worrying about these questions. His drawings are born of enthusiasm in the old sense of the word, en theos.

Listening to him talking elatedly of his experiences, I suddenly wondered if any of it translated to a concern for issues of the environment. Of course, the answer was emphatically yes.

60% of the cloud forests of Mexico have disappeared, I learned. El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve preserve in Chiapas is one that is being preserved. Even the mythic quetzal can still be seen there, the bird venerated by the ancient Mayas and Aztecs as the God of the Air and associated, too, with the snake god Quetzalcoatl. They’re not easy to find, even there, but Tomb had seen one himself.

I forget exactly how he put it when we talked about this new work, but “I feel completely refreshed” is close enough.