Mask #2: the Snowy Owl

#8

01.08.10

Snowy Owl Mask (driftwood, pigment)

- Nick Charles, Sr., Bethel

Bethel, Alaska, is a city of about 7,000 people, mostly Yup'ik Eskimo.  It is the central city of the entire Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region, a hub for over 56 different surrounding villages.  One of those villages is Mekoryuk on Nunivak Island, which is where the puffin ceremonial mask from yesterday's blog was made.  I like this region because it is arguably the most pristine region of native alaskan culture left… many of the people still speak their languages and dialects, hunt and gather their traditional foods, etc.  All of that is done elsewhere too… but the “Western Influence” showed up later in the Bethel area than other parts of the state, allowing them to better preserve their own way.  

This particular mask featured today is actually my favorite mask displayed in the hospital.  It was made in Bethel proper, and you can see the style and technique between the Yup’ik and Cup’ik mask of yesterday are similar, if not identical.  This mask features my second favorite animal on Planet Earth; the Snowy Owl, or Arctic Owl.  

I’ve yet to see one of these with my own eyes in the wild, mostly because that’s exactly how they prefer it.  They hunt rodents and birds on the tundra near and within the Arctic Circle (66º north latitude) during the day.  They have massive wings, large talons, and amazing eyes.  They are brown in summer, and white with brown markings in winter.  An injured Snowy Owl resides at the Alaska Zoo, and we are sure to stop and say hello every trip.  My favorite decoration in our house is a Snowy Owl figure that we have named “Olivia”.  She is featured in many of our family photographs either by choice or by chance.  She is a folk art piece by Leo Smith, my wife’s favorite folk sculptor.  Here is an unflattering picture of Olivia taken quickly now with the iPhone camera, though I have no doubt she will be featured in many photos down the line: 

We even hired an artist to paint her portrait standing within my son's middle initial on the wall in his nursery where we used to live.  When it came time to move from that condo, we were devastated that we would be leaving that portrait behind, and went so far as to consult several general contractors to see if there was any way to save it.  Alas, there was not, and it remains a deep regret that we didn’t have it painted on canvas.

The Snowy Owl mask hangs adjacent to the puffin mask in the hospital; and I thought I’d feature them consecutively in this blog too.  The same struggles with unwanted fluorescent light reflecting off the glass, angle of shot, etc applied here as with the puffin.  I won’t belabor the digital processing, but I think the mask and the photo are nice.  This next image was post-digital processing techniques identical to yesterday's final image:

The song featured today is ‘Winter Birds’ by my man Ray LaMontagne.  He is one of the most soulful singers of any genre that I have ever heard.  He will never release an album that I don’t line up outside the record store in my parka to purchase at midnight.  And by “line up outside the record store in my parka to purchase at midnight” I mean “buy in my pajamas while in bed at midnight when iTunes releases it”.  There are many, many connections I feel to Ray’s music, and some of the possible reasons include:

1)      his middle name is Charles (Yo!  Chucks of the world… Unite!)

2)      he grew up in New Hampshire (my son is going to get a full-ride academic scholarship to Dartmouth, if he knows what’s good for him.)

3)      he graduated from Morgan High School in Morgan, Utah (I graduated from Cottonwood High School in SLC, Utah… but drove through Morgan once and even picked up a diet pepsi at the 7-eleven; which is practically like being given the Key to the City.) 

4)      after high school he took a job in a Maine shoe factory (I wear shoes every day, and have other connections to “feet” that I won’t belabor here.)

      

So you can see, Ray (Charles) and I are real, real tight in a cosmic way for now, and we will become very best friends in the future when he returns some of my countless daily emails, phone calls, snail mails, gift packages, song dedications on both John Tesh’s and Alice Cooper's nationally syndicated radio shows, or some of the other more “personal” attempts to contact him and that my attorneys prefer me to not discuss either openly or in private.

Until tomorrow… thanks for looking, listening and reading.