“I’M NOT AN EXPERT on birds,” says artist Jane Kim. “I’m an expert on the 243 birds I painted, in the position that I painted them.”
Kim is referring to the work that went into From So Simple a Beginning, one of the world’s most ambitious natural-history murals. Covering a 2,500-square-foot wall in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology visitor center, it depicts avian species from every modern bird family, plus 26 extinct ancestors. Starting in 2013, Kim, a scientific illustrator, spent two and a half years researching and painting the feathered specimens in precise detail. “We saw the project as reaching a broad audience—people who care about art, birds, or just nature,” she says. “I didn’t realize the insanity of it until it was done, and then I was like,…
