By JENNA CARERI
Amherst artist Turi MacCombie painted the “Sammy” owl portrait for this year’s Jones Library Samuel Minot Jones Awards for Literary Achievement.
Each year, a different local artist is invited to create an image of an owl to represent the library and Amherst’s literary culture.
“Owls are sort of known to be wise,” MacCombie said in an interview last week at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, where her work is on view.
The Jones Library asked the gallery to recommend an artist for the project.
MacCombie, 68, who paints almost exclusively in watercolor, specializes in animal imagery.
“I love doing animals and birds especially,” she said. “When I got the assignment it was perfect.”
The picture took MacCombie about a week to complete. She says she was given complete freedom with her painting, including what type of owl she used.
The painting depicts a winter scene of a mother barred owl sitting on a low tree branch with three baby owls next to her. The owls are all looking at a green book sitting in the snow on the ground.
“I picked the barred owl because it’s a local owl,” she said. “It was from the library so I wanted to somehow include a book.”
MacCombie studied illustration and painting at Syracuse University starting in 1964, but never got her degree. She took so many art classes, she says, that she would have had to devote an entire year of college just to academic classes in order to graduate.
“I just about died when I heard that,” MacCombie said.” “I didn’t want to be an art teacher. I didn’t need a degree. I just wanted to be a painter, and it worked out just fine.”
She married her late husband, Bruce MacCombie, during her freshman year of college and painted as a hobby until they moved to New York City in the 1970s. There, she began working as a children’s book illustrator, though she occasionally did commercial work.
“I did a whole big job for Godiva Chocolates. They gave me four pounds of Godiva Chocolates to paint. And eat, of course,” she said.
She moved to Amherst with her husband in 2004, and continues to live and paint in the area.
MacCombie says she likes her paintings to look like they could occur in nature. For The Sammy painting, she says, getting the owls to look down at the book was difficult because owls cannot swivel their eyes.
“Wherever their eye is, their head is,” she said. “It was a little tricky finding the owls to actually focus with their heads down. I went through hundreds and hundreds of photos.”
At one point, she says, she changed the entire composition to accommodate the owls’ natural movement, putting the book on the ground instead of on a tree trunk so the owls could see it.
MacCombie ran into a similar problem with natural limits when she decided to include owlets. She says she quickly realized the barred owlets would not work with the winter background of the painting.
“They were little fluff-balls of white, and all you saw was little eyes. They almost looked like cartoons,” she said.
Instead, she painted horned owlets, even though they did not match the barred mother owl. MacCombie says she decided to include the owlets with the mother owl because it held a personal meaning to her.
“The library was the whole focus of my childhood,” she said. “I loved to read, and my mother brought me there.”
The Sammy Awards will be presented April 28 at 6 p.m. at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. The first 100 ticket buyers will receive a signed reproduction of the print.
To see more of MacCombie’s work, visit R. Michelson Galleries, 123 Main St., in Northampton, or, online, visit www.rmichelson.com/artists/turi-maccombie.
