Artist Paula Swisher (photo by Andrew Huth)
The Quirky Bird Art of Paula Swisher
text by Anna Maria Johnson, bird imagery by Paula Swisher
I was privileged to meet Paula Swisher in 1997 while she and I were both studying art at Houghton College in rural western New York. Many late nights, we stayed up painting, drawing, and sharing our life stories. Paula is probably the hardest-working visual artist that I’ve met, and in the past decade or so, has created a rich and wide-ranging body of work in a variety of media–painting, drawing, graphic design, web design, and most recently, interactive media.
In light of recent NC community posts about the relationship between text and images, notably Wendy Voorsanger’s “An Exploration of Poem Painting,” I thought it would be appropriate to share some of Paula’s images which she painted directly onto the pages of discarded business textbooks. Many of her images are direct responses to the pre-existing graphs and phrases from these textbooks, but she re-interprets the business-speak through the lens of her personal experiences to say something entirely new and different.
For instance, Paula Swisher began this particular bird-and-text series during an extended bout of unemployment.
“Unemployment”