When birds + letters = art
By Ilana DeBare
Birds. Letters. Art.
It seems natural, given that those are Jeanette Nichols’ loves, that she would create one-of-a-kind watercolors illustrating the letters in people’s names with birds.Like this one: SUSAN = Sandhill Crane, Upland Sandpiper, Scarlet Tanager, American Avocet, and Northern Shoveler.
Our 2024 Birdathon Adventure Auction is offering one of Nichols’ custom watercolors: the winning bidder can commission Their Name in Birds. But Nichols’ bird-name pieces are only a tiny sliver of the art she’s created over the years. Her Oakland home is festooned with a diverse array of work, ranging from landscape paintings to Hebrew calligraphy to whimsical greeting cards.
Nichols isn’t a professional artist: she spent her career as an oncology and hematology nurse at Children’s Hospital before retiring in 2015. But both creativity and birds have been part of her life since childhood.
“I always drew,” she recalled. “When I was six, we moved to Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino mountains where my mother ran a motel, which we called a ‘resort.’ There was a chair at the bottom of the stairs with a space behind it. I claimed it as my space where I drew and read. I was either there or outdoors.”
She inherited a love of nature from her mother’s family, who hailed from Wyoming.
“When I had trouble learning to swim,” Nichols said, “my uncle pointed out a dipper to me. He said, ‘See that little bird? It can swim. You know you can too.’ Since then it’s always been my favorite bird.”
Throughout her adult life, she created greeting cards and small artworks for friends. She provided some of the images for a new prayer book for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco and submitted paintings each year to the Jewish Community Library’s invitational exhibit. For her wedding to Daryl Goldman in 2004, she spent a year learning Hebrew calligraphy to create their ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract.
Her involvement with birds deepened when she and Daryl took Golden Gate Bird Association’s East Bay Birds class, which was taught at the time by Bob Lewis and Rusty Scalf. She plunged even deeper when she and Daryl enrolled in GGBA’s year-long Master Birder class in 2016.
Meanwhile, Nichols took advantage of retirement to take a landscape painting class and spend more time on art. Now, on their birding vacations, the couple typically ends the day with Daryl compiling a list of every species they found and Jeanette painting a small watercolor of the landscape. Sometimes she documents their trips with a hand-painted booklet of the places and birds they saw.
Despite the classes, birding trips, and time in the field, Nichols insists she is not a “bird artist.” The emotion and experience of birding is more important to her than, say, documenting anatomical details.
“Daryl became an extraordinary birder, while I remained a dreamy birder,” she said. “I know the names of almost all the California birds but I have no desire to go around the world and collect a list of birds. For me, it’s ecstasy to be on the Feather River all alone, watching a dipper teaching its young their song.”
Her latest projects involve pencil drawings of landscapes—intricate, evocative, and less likely to take over her dining room table for days on end.
Nichols’ “Your Name in Birds” piece in the Birdathon auction winner is a kind of sideline—not the focus of her art right now, but a special piece she offered as a way to support GGBA. (It didn’t hurt that Daryl is our volunteer Auction Coordinator.)
While they’re just a small part of Nichols’ overall work, her name pieces draw upon all the other art she’s done. She’s turned Hebrew letters into art. She’s created greeting cards with letters designed from foliage, chemical elements and even hematology images. She’s depicted California birds and nature with watercolor, acrylic, pencil, and even iPad—sometimes realistic, sometimes whimsical. Her most recent Christmas card of a California Quail in an ugly holiday sweater is downright adorable.
For the Birdathon auction prize, Nichols has only one worry.
“Whoever buys it, I hope they have a short name,” she said. “It’s complicated. I try to have birds from the same geographical place. And you need the right letters. For instance, for the letter ‘U,’ I only know Upland Sandpiper. Luckily my son lives in Alaska and I actually saw one when we were out picking blueberries.”
About the Birdathon Adventure Auction:
For the Birdathon Adventure Auction, Nichols is offering a watercolor painting of the name of your choice, with each letter represented by a bird whose name starts with that letter. It’s one of 40 unique trips, experiences, artworks, and other items available!Online bidding opens on May 5 and runs through May 20, 2024. Click here for more details and to place a bid.
