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Birdman Jack Yates unmasked at his West Hampstead home with some of his creations |
Flights of fancy
Simon Wroe meets Jack Yates, a man with fabulous, feather-brained ideas
IN Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds, a great swarm of the creatures flock to a quiet fishing village and begin to attack its inhabitants. Lives are torn apart by the birds’ brutal talons.
But these winged beasts hold no fear for Jack Yates. For the past 12 years, the 83-year-old artist from Lindfield Gardens, West Hampstead, has been making artwork which celebrates the benign and sometimes euphoric union of man and bird.
Or, to put it another way, pictures of people with birds on their heads.
His sparingly printed recent book, The Ballyhoo of Birdland, has a swarm of birds descend on the heads of the unsuspecting public to nest.
He describes the tale (written by his friend, the actress, Carla Wilson) as a “grown up fairy story” in which the men and women of the town, seduced by “a living creature up above causing feelings tantamount to love”, rediscover each other. Forgotten spouses rekindle their vows amid the birdsong.
“I think people definitely need something,” he tells me in his basement studio crammed with bird-wearer masks, painted shoes (pictured) and fantastic puppets. But whether it’s a bird on their head I don’t know. I suppose if it got people together then it would be a good reason for it. A bird happily perched on your head would transform you – you would be a different person.”
It seems Jack has always had birds on the brain. “I grew up in a society where every young man would talk about pigeons and nothing else – like young men talk about cars now,” he says. “It was a world of birds for me.”
He says he got the idea for the head-mounted fowl from the “beer and fish’n’chips parties” his family would throw when he was growing up in the Sheffield slums.
“One uncle would put a tea cosy that looked like a bird on his head and dance around the room singing,” he says. “I was about six or seven at the time and this impressed me enormously.”
The first time he showed the birds was at the Camden Arts Centre, where Jack was an art teacher for 21 years.
He works in many mediums – woodcuts, collage, oils and watercolours – but he found his style gravitating towards paper-cutting for his birds.
Not many artists use the paper-cutting method any more, but Jack’s wife Hanne, to whom he has been married for 54 years, is one of the few that still do. Her work, alongside the puppet-making she continues to do, served as inspiration for his own.
Besides the ubiquitous birds, Jack has also produced a series of paper-cut pieces depicting the aural affliction of tinnitus, from which he has suffered for 10 years.
Perhaps a good gannet on his head might cure it, I suggest.
“I don’t like going round with actual birds on my head,” he confesses. “It’s difficult with live birds, especially when you’re 83 – I’m no spring chicken.”
Then he grins excitedly: “Although that would be a good bird for the sequel.” |
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