Coronado Community READ Event: Feathers & Form Art Workshop

Join visual artist Stacie Birky Greene for a bird drawing workshop designed for people of all levels. In this hands-on session, Stacie will guide participants through techniques to observe and sketch birds with confidence and creativity. You’ll learn how to see key features like proportion, posture, anatomy, and feather texture, and how to capture these on paper with simple, expressive lines. The workshop also encourages participants to connect personally with nature as they draw — seeing birds not just as subjects, but as living forms with motion, attitude, and character.

This program is for adults over the age of 18. Space is limited, registration is recommended. Walk-ins will be accommodated as space permits.  

Originally from Colorado, Stacie Birky Greene received degrees in Art and Art History from the University of Kentucky. She also studied in Florence, Italy, and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Although painting was the focus of her training, she has explored her art in a wide variety of media, including drawing, performance, photography, installation and video.

The central focus of Birky Greene’s work has been to explore nature through a combination of materials and techniques. Her approach has often been guided by a fascination with form and shape, particularly as nodes for connecting unlikely allies, such as coral and cacti. By taking organic materials (or at least their representation) out of context, she compels the viewer to revel in patterns of structural unity. Her recent work has also considered the impact of human consumption and climate change on the natural world. Appalled by mass deforestation and habitat destruction, she has turned her attention to bird species that have gone extinct since the time of her own birth. The tangible results of this study will be revealed over the course of the next few years, in a variety of projects. One feature of these works that is important to consider is her choice of materials: namely, junk mail, which she either uses “as is” or manipulates, with the addition of other detritus, into homemade paper. It is a project that implicates us all in its struggle: here are beautiful objects made, nevertheless, from unwanted materials. Moreover, the materials themselves are the products of overconsumption of resources – fossil fuels burned in production and transportation, and deforestation to provide wood pulp for paper. The problem of avian ecology and the pressures these birds face is multidimensional, but the viewer is placed in the unlikely position of assessing and admiring the victim even as its emblem is formed from components that have been implicated in its destruction.

Birky Greene lives in San Diego, and she exhibits her artwork locally and internationally. She has taught art to children and adults since 1998.