Birds and Light
Lars Jonsson
"My aim was to make birds come alive," writes Lars Jonsson, and succeed he did. Beginning with crude kindergarten daubings, the Swedish-born artist matured into one of the world's pre-eminent chroniclers of wildlife. That journey is now chronicled in Birds and Light (Princeton University Press, $49.50), a lavish and compendious portrait of the artist as nature lover. The autobiographical text, essentially an extended interview with the artist, may be a bit too steeped in art theory for the lay reader, but the beautiful reproductions of Jonsson's oils, sketches and watercolors—bullfinches, partridges, sparrows and geese seemingly poised to leap off the page—exhibit both an ornithologist's categorical mind and an artist's penetrating eye.
-Louis Bayard
