By his own account, John James 探花精选 glimpsed the Arctic Tern for the first time in June of 1833 while visiting the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. 鈥淯ntil that moment this Tern had not been familiar to me, and as I admired its easy and graceful motions, I felt agitated with a desire to possess it,鈥 he wrote, recounting how his party proceeded to gun down dozens of the birds to provide models for his paintings.
These days illustrators like , 44, like to avoid killing their subjects. Rodriguez rendered the tern here as a cutout in a glacial plain, an eerie premonition of the struggles it may face in a changing Arctic. He was in awe of the original: 鈥淚t鈥檚 already so good. I love the image, the gesture of it. It inspires me to think about those kinds of shapes in my own work.鈥 While 探花精选 employed watercolor, pastel, ink, and chalk, Rodriguez uses woodblock patterns supplemented with digital tools. He related to how 探花精选 captured the tern鈥檚 movement through space. 鈥淭he topsy-turvy composition, the way it鈥檚 floating up in the air,鈥 he said. 鈥淚t fits well with the type of work I do.鈥