Jim Moir soars solo in Lady Lever summer exhibition

From a young ‘loner’ with a pair of a binoculars to celebrating Britain’s avian population in a series for Sky Arts, it seems Jim Moir’s fascination with birds has been a lifelong passion.

And now it’s led to his first major solo show in a national gallery, with Dawn to Dusk opening at NML’s Lady Lever Art Gallery tomorrow.

The exhibition at the Port Sunlight gallery encompasses around 45 works – predominantly paintings but also a bronze bird sculpture – which capture a diverse variety of subjects.

There are ravens and crows, nightingales and thrushes and oystercatchers and owls, flocks of curlews in flight, a friendly hen and even – in a nod to nearly Liverpool (and as close to a mythical liver bird as you can get) a pair of cormorants pictured in front of a Brutalist building.

“That painting is in my studio and gallery and it’s one of my favourites, but for some reason it’s never sold,” he says. “I thought ‘that’s got to go to Liverpool’.”

While he now lives in the Kent, dubbed the ‘garden of England’, Moir’s childhood was spent in rural County Durham where, while other boys his age played football, he would set off with a pair of binoculars to birdwatch and then come home to draw and paint what he had seen.

Whether art or twitching came first - he says it “was probably in tandem” although then allows maybe “I probably started scribbling first” - that pattern has endured, with the now 66-year-old rising early to paint, then heading out for a spot of birdwatching, then returning home to fix what he has seen on paper and canvas.

Above: A slideshow of images from Dawn to Dusk: Birds by Jim Moir at the Lady Lever. Top: Moir in his exhibition. Photo by Pete Carr.

He will only paint birds he has seen with his own eyes, after observing them closely in their natural habitat, augmenting that with photographs of his subjects.

He’s recently returned from Norway where he was inspired by the wildlife he saw, and would happily follow in Audubon’s footsteps and paint the birds of America – although only if he could commit them to canvas in the US itself.

Despite his long study of our feathered world-sharers, he admits he’s no closer to really understanding the bird brain.

“I know how they act, but I put them in situations which are maybe understandable to humans. Birds are completely unknown to humans; we don’t know what they’re thinking and how they see the world.”

One example is a goldcrest and treecreeper which Moir spotted in the same bush in Kent. Here he has them interacting together.

The exhibition is divided into themes across the Lady Lever’s three temporary exhibition rooms, with the second room encompassing ‘crepuscular’ birds – those who are particularly active at dawn and dusk – and in which the lighting levels rise and fall, accompanied by an atmospheric eight-minute piece of music by 20th Century French composer Olivier Messiaen.

Above: A slideshow of images from Dawn to Dusk: Birds by Jim Moir

The third room features a series of images of birds, including corn buntings and goldfinches, perched on barbed wire-entwined posts.

Moir has created several sculptures over the years as part of his artistic practice, but the one on show in this third room at the Lady Lever is his first bird.

“Another thing I did when I was a kid was make Airfix models,” he says. “And this sculpture is clay – and part of a Stuka!”

As for his next project, it’s a bit of a departure from beaks, claws, feathers and wings.

“At the moment I’m painting a load of small watercolours of food,” Moir reveals. “It’s for a gallery in Dartmouth as part of a food festival. Lemons, in a naïve way.

“But birds is a constant. Everything else is a bit of fluff!”

Dawn to Dusk: Birds by Jim Moir is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery from June 14 to November 2. Entrance is free and the artworks are for sale.