Most people who drive past Lynda Proper's 1850s barn don't realize it's a comfortable home. Hidden in plain sight, it's an artist's retreat, a work in progress built from the inside out over the past 35 years with a keen eye for the unique and lasting. But the swallows find it every year, welcomed on their return each spring with open doors and windows, because even after all these years, Proper says," It's been their home longer than our house. If the swallows didn't come back, I'd be really, really sad."Swallow's Quest is the name of Proper's art business and her website (www.SwallowsQuest.com) showcasing the intricately painted birds and fish she creates as ornaments, lapel/tie pins and pins. Swallows are not among the flock of her creations, though hummingbirrds, red-tailed hawks, chickadees, herons and dodos are,as well as at least four kinds of trout and sockeye salmon.
Trained as a musician, in the early 1970's Proper headed a Schuyler County agency for employment and training; she helped organize the farmer's market in Montour Falls as well as the Ithaca Farmer's Market. Recognizing her outlook was different from those around her, she saw herself with two choices - to fit herself into her work environment or to create an environment that would fit her. She jokes that defining herself as an artist creates a package to fit and explain the diverse aspects of her diverse personality. If you're an artist, she says, that's a good-enough explanation for why she lives in a barn, says things others may find puzzling, and (has a different sense of time than other people).
In a more serious vein, she asked herself what she truly wanted. "Very little," she concluded."More than anything, I want my time and space, my independence and possibilities. I wanted to know what it was like to have enough solitude to create (my) own measure of reality. And I like being a homemaker, I like making supper. That's been my luxury."
For years, while raising her children, she was a freelance calligrapher. Then a job in the wood-shop of Trumansburg artist and craftsman Gunther Keil served as both apprenticeship and inspiration.
As long-time observer of birds - not as a formal birdwatcher, Proper emphasizes, but rather as someone who's always lived in rural surroundings and has learned to "catch the moment" of a bird's character - she designs bird-shapes that are still cut from sycamore wood to her specifications in Keil's shop. Proper's face lights up as she describes watching mallards land at Clute Park. "There's a moment you think they're going to (crash) into the other birds and knock them over but they don't. I just laugh each time I see that." And several months ago, watching a feisty kestrel chasing five buzzards, she knew the kestrel was the next bird she'd develop. Once she has the wood shapes for a bird, she'll wet-sculpt an acrylic medium over the wood, adding fine details with a pin, then paints them.
It's no accident that her background in calligraphy gives each bird the look it might have in an illuminated manuscript. "The design is in the arc of my wrist," she explains. "In calligraphy, each letter is a stroke, so what strokes are in your hand?" She paints birds in batches - about a dozen per day. How may hours does it take per bird? "I shudder to think," she laughs. But there's a lot of drying time between coats of paint and medium, and she once calculated that a pheasant, one of her larger birds, requires 24 steps.
She mostly creates the birds from late summer through the beginning of December, putting in 12 to 15 hour days in her loft studio. This ends up being about 600 birds as pins and ornaments, she says. They are sold mostly through museums and art galleries across the U.S., as well as a few crafts shows.
At the same time, she remains close-enough to her customers to see her work create connections, like the family who ordered a batch of cardinal pins to honor a mother who enjoyed feeding them and a friend who was given a dodo pin who recalls how the gift sweetened a difficult life transition.
"It's not really a product," she says of her work. "But some really nice places and people like my stuff. And", she adds judiciously, "There are some people you couldn't give (them) to. Which is the way it should be, I think."
