Catherine Courtenaye
What the Nighthawk Knows

My ongoing body of abstract paintings, Avian Witness, developed in part as a response to the growing divide between the natural world and the manmade environment. As wild habitats diminish, I turn to primeval forces — animal migration, magnetic pull, and wind — for inspiration. My work evokes natural patterns as they intersect with the human-modified landscape. Birds still migrate, yet often over vast built-up expanses of large cities.

Over gestural loops of color, the subsequent layers of my paintings are created by silkscreening facsimiles of 19th-century handwriting fragments. These bits of historical letterforms signal human culture.

With a steel-nibbed pen — the type used since the 1850s — I draw species of birds found in the Rockies. These drawings are the basis for large curvilinear traceries on top of the rectilinear compositions. Bird forms are not obvious once transposed onto the uppermost surface of each painting; rather, it is the movement of flight that is transmitted.

By overlaying the geometric, color-filled slivers with flowing black strokes, a complex, polyrhythmic patterning emerges. In making these paintings, I envision how opposing systems of human development and natural forces might coexist in a harmonious ecosystem.