Hanging out in a room full of long-deceased animals isn’t for everyone. But for artist Justin Gibbens, the specimen collection room at Central Washington University is a place of continual revelation. Snakes and lizards suspended in formaldehyde, shelves of small mammal “study skins,” and drawers upon drawers of birds — all documented with handwritten tags and an old-school card catalog.
“I know it’s slightly disconcerting … There’s a lot of death in here,” Gibbens concedes. “But I see it as almost like a chapel that celebrates biodiversity.”
And for an artist whose work is rooted in faithful documentation, the collection of creatures is a treasure trove. “You can observe the patterning, the color, the feather detail,” Gibbens says, full of awe and appreciation. “There’s just nothing that beats having the actual specimen to work with.”
Gibbens graduated from CWU in 1998 with a degree in drawing and painting, but didn’t discover the biology department’s specimen room until several years later, when he had decided to pursue a certificate in natural science illustration from the University of Washington.
“You go to art school, and it’s just not cool to be a wildlife artist,” Gibbens explains. “It’s all contemporary art theory. And at the time, I was fully invested in that. I loved it. But I got out of school and thought, ‘What is it that I want to make an image of?’”
The answer was bugs. And reptiles, and the common wildlife and “creepy-crawlies” he’s encountered over a lifetime spent in Central Washington — early childhood in the Tri-Cities, high school in Ephrata, college in Ellensburg and, since 2003, a home in the tiny rural town of Thorp with his wife, artist Renee Adams. (The couple represent two of six co-founders of Punch Projects, a firehouse-turned-regional arts space just down the road.)
When he originally learned about the illustration program in Seattle, Gibbens saw it as a way to hone his drawing skills and possibly even find paid work as an artist. “I thought maybe I could do some illustrations for Ranger Rick or National Geographic or something,” he recalls. “But really what that experience has done is given me a background for my own studio practice.”
It’s safe to say that Gibbens’ artistic practice — which takes place in a home studio teeming with vintage taxidermy and animal drawings — departs from anything you’d see in Ranger Rick.
Using the technical skills of natural science illustration, his striking watercolor images start with exactitude but take a surreal turn: a raccoon with three tails; a walrus whose tusks bend into a pretzel; an “Appalachian Pelican” outfitted in pheasant feathers. “It’s using the conventions of observational drawing in an unconventional way,” he says. It’s also incorporating a visual wink.
The conventions involve a meticulous watercolor process that starts with tracing paper on a light table, moves to outlining biological details with India or walnut ink, then repeating coats of watercolor ink (called glazing) until an accurate hue is achieved. The more true-to-life Gibbens can make the details, the more the viewer is willing to make the leap to his fantastical visions.
The UW illustration program taught him another crucial bit of knowledge: Birds make good paintings. “I just always assumed that birds were too decorative, too pretty,” Gibbens confesses. “They didn’t hold my interest the same way that creepy-crawlies did. But working with an artist who really understands the anatomy of a bird — and who brought that enthusiasm to his students — gave me this appreciation, awareness and interest.”
That teacher was renowned wildlife illustrator Tony Angell, a Seattle artist who also carves serene bird sculptures from stone. “He really turned me on to the beauty of birds,” Gibbens says. Once he started taking a closer look at the wide avian world, Gibbens began thinking about the animals’ evolutionary history and realized, “Oh, they’re dinosaurs” — a subject he had drawn extensively as a child. That’s when it clicked: “Maybe birds are cool.”
Now birds are frequent subjects in his work, including a recent series based on the mysterious habits of regional birds. (“It’s kind of ambiguous,” he says of the paintings, which feature bright birds in action, “whether it’s some sort of territorial dispute or a mating or courtship ritual.”)
Also in progress is a visual exploration pairing common birds with dinosaur skeletons (the latter shrunken to bird-scale). One image features a chukar superimposed with a T-Rex skeleton. “I recently learned there have been feathered birds flying on this planet for over 160 million years,” he notes, sounding like a full-fledged bird nerd. “I’m trying to give a little nod to their evolutionary past with a humorous juxtaposition.”
As Gibbens points out, nature has concocted some pretty weird stuff on its own. (Look no further than the platypus.) “The creatures that inhabit this planet are so surreal already,” he says, “I just push it a little further.”
In some of his watercolors, creatures behave in curious ways: a flock of geese weave their long necks together; two narwhals kiss despite awkward tusks. In other pieces, curiosity comes in the form of unusual animal anatomies.
Take “Black-necked Stilt with Vestiges,” in which a shorebird stands at the water’s edge on five or six bright pink legs. As in several pieces, Gibbens has “aged” the heavyweight paper using water, oolong tea and rock salt. “I want to make it seem as if maybe this is a document that’s been around for a while,” he explains. Maybe this is a creature that went extinct long ago, or has yet to be discovered.
The stilt is a spin on a piece by John James Audubon, whose 1838 compendium Birds of America set the standard for natural science illustration with its 435 illustrated birds. A prominent historical figure whose many misdeeds have come to light in recent years (for starters: He was a slaveholder who bought and sold people according to his fluctuating financial needs), Audubon’s artistic influence is undeniable even as it is stained.
As a practitioner of the same art form, Gibbens is well aware of the controversy — though the extent of Audubon’s dark history was not widely known when Gibbens created his Audubon-inspired 2007-2008 series Birds of Paradise. “My interest in riffing on some of his classic portraits was simply my way of appreciating his work,” Gibbens says, “albeit in a rather subversive or irreverent way.”
Gibbens notes another elephant in the room of birds: Audubon hunted and killed thousands of birds to procure the “perfect” specimens for his illustrations. “Historically, his name has been associated with environmental stewardship,” Gibbens says. “But his own methods of obtaining his subject matter could hardly be described as environmentalism as we’ve come to know it.”
It’s easy to see a conservation message in Gibbens’ work — whether overtly, as in his series of whales whose skin is painted with decoy patterns, or in his overall choice to make art that celebrates nature’s biological beauty amid increasing species extinction. But Gibbens prefers to let viewers take from it what they will.
“Are these mutations caused by pollution? A comment on the loss of biodiversity? Or a science experiment gone awry?” he posits. “I don’t want to be didactic … I want it to be open to interpretation.”
That’s part of the reason Gibbens incorporates an ethereal aspect to his paintings, despite their technical realism. He attributes this to a college course he took in Hefei, China, on Chinese fine-line painting. Taught by professor and artist Chen Li, the class helped Gibbens bring translucency to his work — an “ephemeral quality,” he says, that nods to the “fleeting nature of life.”
His other artistic influences range from English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, known for his studies of animal motion, to Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons, where legs often peddle wildly while suspended midair. Sometimes Gibbens’ inspiration is more personal, such as with his many-headed, many-tailed raccoon.
One night he hit a raccoon that had darted in front of his car. Gibbens felt awful. “I need to paint this now,” he thought, “just to sit with it for a while.” The last thing he’d noted was the raccoon’s legs running across the road. Now, looking at the painting after some time has passed, he sees it through a wider lens. “Is this something in motion? Is it a time lapse?” he asks. “Or some malformation — a creature that’s evolving with added appendages?”
Gibbens’ unconventional and witty approach invites a lot of questions, which he welcomes. But he says what he’s really after is “an image that’s pleasing to look at … even if it makes you scratch your head a little bit.” He loves the painting process, even the painstaking parts like endless feather details. The aesthetics are always at the top of his mind.
In the end he says his work falls in line with an artistic endeavor many thousands of years old. “Think about the earliest images done by humans: cave paintings of animals,” he says. “That impulse to depict the creatures that surround us and inhabit the same land, the same waters, it’s a very human thing.”
Catch up with the artists featured in the first season of Art by Northwest, and watch for new Season 2 episodes as they roll out in August, September and October, 2025.
Brangien Davis
