Flex Mentallo

Given his almost supernatural ability to bring birds to life, he does not consider himself a wildlife artist, which, although he admires many exponents of this genre, has never been his raison d'etre. His love of the look of birds and his desire to depict them, especially in flight, is his continuing passion. There is a lightness of touch, an interest in birds in motion, of rendering qualities of light even at the expense of anatomical and surface detail that perhaps distinguishes him most.

I've had a lifelong interest in nature painting - especially those produced in the nineteenth century by the likes of Edward Lear and John Gould - but only recently began to look at contemporary artists in this field and seek out books on them.Ray Ching was born in Wellington, New Zealand and has been called an ‘artist’s artist’ and among bird painters is a draughtsman without peer. A renowned artist of life-like portraits, Ching paints obsessively to push the boundaries of bird painting from its more familiar tradition, to break entirely new ground. Obtained from a German book dealer on Abebooks relatively cheaply, I was surprised by its enormous size - it is 19" tall [yet still not the largest book found this year!] And the production values are amazing.

It was a decision to replace a lifetime's worth of sci fi and fantasy paperbacks with hardcover editions that sparked my current focus on book collecting, not realizing how challenging many editions would be to find [let alone to afford, in certain cases]. While it's very satisfying to obtain a pristine limited edition of a set of books like Wolfe's - and incidentally, already selling on the secondary market for $2000 or thereabouts - the real thrill of book collecting for me is and always will be the discovery of something previously unknown. Raymond Ching. The Bird Paintings Water colours and pencil drawings/ 1969- 1975

One may best summaries the tetralogy as a bildungsroman, that is, a story that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, in which character change is a key factor. If this seems familiar to afficionados of comic books, it should!

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”