About the artist behind Spirit of the Bird
Richard Merrill has...wait a minute, this is MY story! No third person, please!
I feel I have lived many lifetimes in this one life, as a mapmaker, designer, aerospace engineer, professional puppeteer, and artist. Throughout my life, my love of birds has grown. I'm a bird enthusiast, appreciator, and lover of these wild flying spirits!
Making Kites
I made kites with my father, and learned my love of the magical moment when a kite I made took to the air! My bird art kites have been in galleries and are in personal collections. Made in the Japanese style, with bamboo frames and Japanese paper sails, they are decorated with art to evoke the spirit of the bird in each one. They are designed to fly, and also make illumine any room as inspiring art on the wall.
Making Jewelry
I love working with copper! The colors, the feel, the way it hardens when I work it, the sound of cutting and filing, the warm sheen, and the earthy shine it takes when I polish it.
I love cold working it, shaping and riveting larger pieces, and hammering textures into it. I also love drawing, and copper wire takes a lovely line, making the line gestures of my beaten wire jewelry almost like brush strokes.
Even when I was a builder, it was delight when a client chose copper flashing for waterproofing around roofs and windows. To shape this beautiful metal to cling to the building’s form, protecting the wood from water, and to see it gain an organic blue-green patina over time; this felt like a privilege. In addition, copper is one of the most recycled metals. I like that I can solder it using a simple substance like borax and then clean it with vinegar.
I sometimes wonder why I’m so attracted to copper. I have discovered that it is an abundant North American metal, and has been smelted and worked in North America for over 9,500 years! Connecting the dots with family stories, my maternal grandfather had taught me about his mother’s indigenous ancestry in the land between Lake Superior, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. She had been adopted at age six, so many records have been lost, but we know she was born in Canada in the 1850s, probably on the Six Nations Reserve on Grand River in Ontario, Canada.
In ancient times this area between the lakes was home to an unusually pure copper called “native copper”, which sparked a flourishing copper culture in the Great Lakes region known to anthropologists today as the Saugeen Complex. This “chalcolithic” culture, in the area of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Algonquian peoples, is one of the oldest copper cultures in the world, so perhaps it’s a former life connection that drives my passion for this warm and beautiful metal!
Creating my book for Dover Publications
When Dover accepted my book proposal for paper birds that fly like paper airplanes, I was faced with one main challenge. I was only allowed one die-cut shape. That meant I needed to focus on songbirds, since their shapes are similar (though I did include a crest for the Northern Cardinal!). I had already been aware of the state of the songbird population, and its almost precipitous decline over the last twenty years or so. Loss of habitat to building and agriculture, changing habitats due to climate change, and nest parasites such as the Brown-headed Cowbird have contributed, but the scale of the decline of populations of once-common birds from many millions to hundreds of thousands is still somewhat of a mystery.
This spurred me on to create a bird model that would fly reliably and be able to represent many species of songbirds. The bird shape has more aerodynamic drag than a paper airplane, and needs a tiny bit of weight up front, so I designed it to use a penny for looping flight, or you can upgrade to a longer flight by paying more, with a dime.
It was fascinating to illustrate the birds against their own habitat, and makes for a visually compelling book. Some important or quirky facts completed the picture, and Dover published it in 2016. It is in print, and has 4-1/2 stars on Amazon. But of course, those books aren't signed by the author. Each book purchased here is signed by me.