Feathered friends

Everything but Egret

Mixed media on pine wood: Feathers from my collection that I gathered while travelling: Swan, wedge-tailed eagle, blue kookaburra, pheasant coucal, seagull, mallard duck, barn owl, hawk, rooster, crow, chicken. Pressed hydrangea flowers from the West End.

Plumage

Mixed media on pine wood: Feathers from my collection that I gathered while travelling; Blue kookaburra, barn owl, collared sparrow hawk, whistling kite. Pressed flowers I found at the West Vancouver seawall.

Margret

Mixed media on wood: Feathers from my collection that I gathered while travelling; Blue kookaburra, barn owl, collared sparrow hawk, whistling kite, eagle…. Ink, acrylic and a poem my Amma (Grandmother wrote right before she passed away). This piece was also given to a friend of mine whom is the most amazing Haida would carver. A close friend of his passed and to help heal his heart we hung this piece in his new home.

– Margret Josephson

My Amma’s passion was birds she loved birds and it was known by everyone whom knew her. She had bird baths, feeders and little dishes all over her yard filled with treats for her birds. She would talk to them and they would sing back to her with delight. She passed on her love to me as a small child. She would share there names with me and let me help her feed them. I instantly felt that passion for our feathered friends and it has stuck with me ever since.

So it’s not surprising that I would fall in love and propose to a man whom shares such a passion for all wild life. While traveling with my husband we spent a lot of our time bird watching. And feather collecting just seemed to go hand in hand or should I say feather in hand with our passion. I love looking at these pieces and seeing each moment we found one of these feathers. It brings me back to the most gorgeous and exotic places with the love of my life. And it’s funny how as I created each piece my love and I would sit and talk about each feather that we found and reminisce. Some of the birds we had no clue what they were and hand to search them up in books and the internet after the fact. Like the pheasant coucal!! Coming from the prairies we had never seen a bird with orange, black and white leopard spotted feathers! It was so amazing! I remember my husband pulling onto the side of the road while we were in Australia to take a pee (not like back home where you walk into a ditch and go at your leisure there are way to many poison filled critters on that land mass) and coming back with our first Pheasant coucal feather!! I was so gitty! Picture most women’s reactions to a diamond ring that was my reaction to the pheasant coucal feather!! They are so gorgeous! And we didn’t see this interesting bird until weeks later we asked so many people and no one knew what it was. It was like a unicorn shed it’s horn!! Lol… But eventually we figured it out.

And the blue kookaburra that was such a score! And did you know the blue kooks don’t laugh, they are blue and they don’t laugh what an ironic situation. I am so very lucky to have such an amazing adventure partner, he spent hours and hours with me washing and sterilizing and drying and grooming all the feathers we had found. So much work went into each one yet as I see them flowing on these pieces and all the memories flooding back it couldn’t have been more worth it. Never mind I wasn’t even the one to grow and prune them listen to me talking about so much work. Ha ha…