~by Jeff Tryon
G
Geoff Keller
eoff Keller spent over 20 years traipsing up and down the North American Continent recording songbirds. But a bad reaction to a doctor’s prescription and a chance encounter with a book about how our brains work led him into new way of presenting birds—as ink drawings on wood sculptures. You can see the amazing results at the Hoosier Artist Gallery on South Jefferson Street, where Keller’s painstakingly wrought, intricately detailed artworks are offered for sale. Keller laminates layers of lightcolored Aspen wood into a large block, then carves it into a vaselike sculpture using some power
tools, but mostly a wood rasp and sandpaper. Then he meticulously creates the drawing by applying thousands of tiny ink dots to create the image of a bird or other animal from a photograph. The artwork is protected between ultra-thin coats of poly acrylic so that it can’t bleed into the wood or be smudged after it is finished. “What I’m doing is actually portraiture, I’m working from photographs taken by professional photographers,” Keller said. He has most often drawn on the images of regional photographer Steve Gifford. His most recent and ambitious project is the image of a mountain lion’s face from a photo by a
48 Our Brown County • July/August 2020
courtesy photos
California woman named Alice Cahill. “I found her image of a mountain lion’s face, and it was just so exquisite, I thought, I’ve got to draw this.” The mountain lion piece took over three months to complete and involved creating a new technique of blurring the dots to represent soft fur. For 24 years, Keller recorded birds for Cornell Lab, which has the largest archive of wildlife recordings in the world. “I have probably archived more high-quality recordings of North American birdsongs than any other individual in the history of the Cornell Lab,” he said. “During that time I archived about 3,000 recordings.”
