This Is Not an Owl

A friend once looked at my painting of a barn owl and told me she was a little afraid of it.

I understood why.

In Cherokee tradition, owls can carry complicated meanings. Some Cherokee traditions associate owls, particularly the great horned owl, with the spirit world, witches and things that move through the darkness. Owl calls could be regarded as warnings or omens, and the screech owl could serve as a messenger of things yet to come. These traditions are not as simple as saying that every owl is a symbol of death, but there is certainly a reason an owl can make some Cherokee people uneasy.

So when my friend looked at my painting and felt that uneasiness, I didn’t tell her she was wrong.

I told her, “It’s not an owl.”

She looked at me.

“It’s a painting.”

I was thinking of René Magritte.

In 1929, Magritte painted a remarkably realistic pipe and wrote beneath it, Ceci n’est pas une pipe—”This is not a pipe.” Of course it isn’t. You can’t fill the painted pipe with tobacco. It is an image of a pipe, not the thing itself. Magritte was playing with the distance between an object and the image we make of it.

This is not an owl.

It is paint on a surface. It is shapes and shadows and light. It is my attempt to capture something I find beautiful: the stillness of a barn owl, its enormous eyes, the softness of its feathers, the strange elegance of a bird made for the night.

We give things meaning. We inherit meanings from our families and our communities. We learn which animals to welcome, which ones to fear, which ones carry warnings and which ones bring comfort. Those meanings can be powerful. They can even become part of the way we see.

But a painting is not the thing it represents.

A painting of an owl cannot fly into your house. It cannot call from your roof. It cannot carry a message from the spirit world. It cannot foretell a death.

I don’t want to erase the older meanings of the owl. I am Cherokee, and those traditions are part of the complicated landscape of meaning I carry with me. But I also don’t believe an inherited meaning has to be the only way we encounter something.

Not every owl brings bad news, and this one brings none. Because this is not an owl. It is a painting.

I hope you see beauty in it.