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Chicago-Sun-Times Metro Sunday - April 23, 2000 Artist brings the Field Alive
After studying art history and teaching, the "artist in residence" at the Field Museum adds another perspective and dimension to its endless exhibits. By Nancy Moffett In the perpetual Twilight of a Field Museum exhibit hall, Peggy Macnamara eases her studio-in-a backpack from her shoulders, pulls out brushes and watercolors and prepares to reanimate a world of nature preserved behind glass. "Imagine that all you hear are birds chirping. I walk in and sit down and it's just heaven," said Macnamara, who shows up at the museum at 7:30 a.m. She's "artist in residence" at the Field, and hours before the crowds are her "morning meditation" when she sets up beside a display case, balancing a drawing board on her knee, appreciates the quite and reincarnates the stuffed specimens on paper with pencil and watercolor. Macnamara had studied art history and taught when she arrived at the Field 20 years ago to practice her drawing with the museum collections-the stuffed animals and sculptures didn't charge modeling fees. She has, she says, made a career of the long pose. The museum was a good fit for her life as an artist and mother--it was a peaceful respite from her seven children. For 10 years she drew still lifes from the China Exhibit and from the Field -Commissioned Malvina Hoffman sculptures of mankind. She was also drawn to the building's classical interior architecture. As she practiced nature studies of say, butterflies, she also used Field icons- the Ionic columns that ring Stanley Field Hall, the dinosaur towering over vast space, the totem pole- as they reflected in the glass display cases. The work, in fact, "became about the museum" Then, in 1991, displays were being changed and someone said, "let's put her up in the exhibit," Macnamara said.
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"We were redoing the animal exhibits," said Debra
Moskovits, a biologist and director of the Field's environmental and
conservation program. "She was there painting," and the curators thought the
art would amplify their own science, Mosovits said. "Our main attempt was to
give the animals a voice and relate them to the public. She was doing it in a
totally different way." That's why her framed works now hang close to the
displays she drew them from. People would see her pictures of the gray fox, a
deer or the greater kudu. They would "see the colors she sees, then look back"
and . . . "there it is!" Moskovits said. People drift by; some stop, curious
about her work, about art in a scientific setting. "I connect them to the piece
of nature in the glass case," Macnamara said.
Doing so has made her into something of a performance artist; the public can watch; she doesn't mind. They become fascinated, as if by a magic show. Once a group applauded; once a boy plunked a quarter into the cup she keeps close by for pencil shavings. Although she sometimes calls herself an "alien" in the scientific environment, she is perhaps better seen as enchantress, a trim traveling-light sketcher of natural wonders. Her job description: "Let's bring it to life." To do that she has traveled to Ecuador and Madagascar with Field scientists and will be on hand at the museum to paint Sue the T-Rex at the opening of the long-awaited exhibit next month. And she has the run of the Field. "She's been sort of a legend," said Dave Willard, collection manager for birds. "When she started asking to use subjects from behind the scenes, we liked that the specimens had a secondary use for art as well." Now, she takes her Art Institute students into the maze of corridors and cabinets on the museum's third floor where thousands of specimens lie in drawer after drawer. "A couple of weeks ago, she had a class painting eggs," Willard said. The exercise was part of her philosophy that art and science are birds of a feather. "There's a whole drawing course to be taught in how nature presents itself," she said. One of her secrets for her students is to "trick 'em into thinking: 'She's going to teach me to draw' " when in fact, its "getting people to surrender to do it." "Start with putting a mark on the page," Macnamara says. Her students agree. She makes everyone feel as if they can do it," said Bonnie Selden, of Elmhurst, who has taken three classes with Macnamara through the Art Institute and two two-day workshops she teaches at Morton Arboretum. Macnamara's fundamental rule is: "There are no rulesSyou just keep doing it until you get it right and don't worry about making mistakes," Selden said. Before Macnamara, "the Field was something I took my kids to when they were little," Selden said. "Now it's something I go to all the time . . . I feel like the world is opening up with knowledge." |
