Séverine Bourgeois-
Title : Yellow plumed bird of paradise
Medium: Ink and watercolor on coton paper
Price : AUD 495
National Graphic
1953
Volume CIII
Number One
About the artwork:
I received a page of a 1950’s issue of National Geographic magazine.
It explains that in 1909, Sir William Ingram transplanted yellow plumed birds of paradise, originary from New Guinea, in the island of Little Tobago, where a rare bird sanctuary was implanted.
I chose to deconstruct the image and to work by isolating its elements : the landscape, the location of the scene, the subject and the context, and to finish the predominant colors.
The focus is on the yellow plumed bird of paradise, who is the real subject of this page. It also shows the shape of Little Tobago’s island, in which there’s the initial landscape of the illustration. The deep blue and the greenish one are extracted and diffused in two circles which translate the movement and resonance of these colors.
More indications are added with typewriting machine and ink stamps, such as the legend, title and coordonates that allow to locate the place of this sanctuary that seems to still exist.
It was a real challenge to think and work around this page, because it shows the importance of the species preservation, and that what is in our mind today was already a concern for some people more than a century ago. In my art work, I am preoccupied by the nature in its wholeness, and the connection that we have with it and need to explore more in purpose of protect it efficiently.
About Séverine:
Visually impaired since I was twelve years old, I have learned to see differently. I have always questioned the notion of look and phenomenology. I have always played with body, nature, perception. A poetry of distortion.
I use words and images to explore limits and create hybrid universes in which my deep interest in anatomy, botany and zoology shines through. I create paradoxes, additions that subtract, upheavals and shifts. I invent composites, modify scales, abuse boundaries and rigid rules of perspective.
From the word is born the image. First of all, there is the text, tangible proof of the idea to be explored, and which frequently fades behind the drawing. Ink is my favorite medium, the one with which it all begins. Other techniques can help support the concept, but the crude and symbolic contrast of ink on paper remains an intrinsic necessity in my artistic creation process.
My explorations rarely translate into a single image. The multiplicity of experiences and results fully participate in the course of the idea’s transcription. I tend to establish visual collections of dots, lines and flat tints from which my own perceptions are born.
I like to cheat my illness, a method of trying to control my helplessness in the face of its inexorable degradation.
Like a challenge, my little revenge.
I have fun with the dangers of the limit.
I live for a few moments in the dark.
I always see in the blur.
Disturbed body and blurred vision.