The Audubon-esque avian art lining the walls of Bird Café, a hot spot gastropub in Fort Worth, Texas, is the work of Stuart and Scott Gentling. Longtime Fort Worth residents, the twin brothers shared a passion for the topography, the people, and particularly the birds of their adopted home state. Together they produced Of Birds and Texas, originally published to great acclaim in 1986 in an elephant folio limited edition that included 40 of their exquisitely detailed bird portraits and 10 Texas landscapes. Author A.C. Greene lauded it as “the most stunning and prodigious book in Texas history (and possibly forever),” and The Dallas Morning News praised it as “the most magnificent book ever produced in Texas.”
The Gentlings’ sister, Suzanne, an artist in her own right, called Stuart the birdman in the family. “He had a fascination with them as a child,” she says. “In the old days in Fort Worth, going down into the Trinity River Valley was like going into the wilderness. At a young age, Stuart would come home with dead birds in a pouch on his right side, and in the pouch on the left side there’d be a nest of eggs to hatch under his desk lamp or a wounded bird he would rehab.”
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After Stuart discovered John James Audubon’s The Birds of America in junior high, the brothers went to work copying the paintings. As adults, they would dedicate much of their lives to producing their book of Texas birds: “They decided to tackle this huge project that grew and grew and grew. It overtook the family,” Suzanne recalls.
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Using the Gentling brothers’ birds as décor was the inspired idea of legendary Dallas-Fort Worth restaurateur and art collector Shannon Wynne. Although the brothers are no longer alive (Stuart died in 2006; Scott in 2011), it’s nice to imagine them pulling up a kiwi-colored chair and enjoying a beer and some Comanche bison ribs in sight of all those black-framed limited edition prints of their lifework.
An amplified mass-market edition of Of Birds and Texas (University of Texas Press, 2001) is available on Amazon.com. Read more of our interview with Suzanne Gentling and get recipes from the Bird Café.
From the October 2015 issue.
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Source: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2015/09/of-birds-and-texas/
