Sage Magazine-Spring 2013

The Sage Magazine is an arts and journalism publication of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Selected paintings were featured in their Spring 2013 publication. Below is a section of the article along with the featured work:

"A bird on the wing can be so ephemeral as to seem hallucinatory — no sooner has the brain received "rose-breasted grosbeak(?)" from the eye than the scarlet flash has dissolved into the trees. A hummingbird may not literally be quicker than the neural pathways that process it, but its passage is rapid enough to distort sight, to read as a streak in the sky rather than a fixed, fluttering point.

Vermont-based artist Nissa Kauppila explores the transitory relationship between the bird, the brain, and the eye in her series in gouache. Feathered bodies distend in long, comet-like trails; vaporous wings and pointed feet bleed across the page like the lingering, smokey residue of a small explosion. Kauppila's paintings are faithful not to the anatomy of a great blue heron or a wood duck, but to what it's like to experience those species, briefly and gloriously. Her work isn't as literal as James Audubon's, but it's just as true" -Ben Goldfarb

Sage Magaine: http://www.sagemagazine.org/