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Drawing of bird had right look photo by Drew Fleming Ashland artist Randy Johnson's studio doubles as a laundry room. Designer tracked down artist to illustrate new bird book By BILL VARBLE Randy Johnson's rendition of a red-tailed hawk had the character and personality that a book-cover designer was looking for to grace a collection of essays. Diana Howard needed art for the book she was designing for a San Francisco publisher. The anthology about birds would feature nonfiction by Peter Matthiessen, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams and other writers, that was for sure. But what about the art? Howard almost bought the rights to classic studies by John James Audubon, the pioneering naturalist and wildlife artist, but both she and the publisher decided they wanted something more contemporary. Enter Howard's husband. The man was relaxing with a microbrew one day last winter when something about the label on the bottle caught Howard's eye: a hawk with its signature red tail spread wide. Aha. The look for the book. Howard took it to publisher Larry Habegger. He liked it too. "The hawk's got a sly, friendly look about it," Habegger says. "It has some character instead of being a static study." Howard called the Mendocino Brewing Company, the brewer of Red Tail Ale. Who was the artist that did that hawk? A guy up in Oregon, they said, Randy Johnson. Created the hawk on the label back in 1983. Howard tracked down Johnson in Ashland, and a deal was cut. The result is new wildlife art by Johnson that graces "The Gift of Birds." The 322-page trade paperback (Traveler's Tales, $17.95) is expected to be available at Barnes and Noble in Medford and Bloomsbury Books in Ashland. For a look, visit www.travelerstales.com and click on catalog. For Johnson, Howard's call was a call from the blue. "That was wild," he says. In addition to the hawk, Johnson created a blue jay, a brown pelican, a magnolia warbler and a rufous hummingbird for the book's front cover and a little feather design for the back. Howard and Johnson scanned the chapters, picking species for color and cover impact. Maybe you can't tell a book by its cover, but Habegger says its effect is critical. In a recent industry study, readers cited it as the most important factor in whether they bought a book, above price, reviews, word of mouth, ads, store displays and author interviews. "They bring to life the world we're talking about in a strong way," Habegger says of Johnson's cover birds. "You're pulled in.'' Once you're in you find pages full of bird-human interactions from the sublime (philosopher David Abram's meeting with a condor in the high Himalaya) to the down and dirty (Sports Illustrated's Robert Boyle's "Nothing Tastes Like Roadkill"). There are epiphanies worthy of the best fiction. Peter Matthiessen encounters the last cranes of Siberia in a primordial wilderness coveted by multinational timber and mining companies. As she struggles with the desire to be a vegetarian, Alice Walker meets a chicken in Bali she suddenly sees as a sister. At the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge near Great Salt Lake, Terry Tempest Williams finds that bird habitat and human families are both built on the shifting sands of time. Even editor Habegger in an introduction relates a fantastic experience with a hummingbird in his home on a San Francisco hill overlooking the bay. Johnson remembers the moment he knew he wanted to be an artist. He was born in Florida and grew up a Navy brat in Virginia, Hawaii and San Francisco. One day when he was a 19-year-old student at Florida State University, he saw an artist in a campus coffee hangout use a very fine technical pen to create an eagle on a placemat. Johnson worked as an illustrator for Florida's Department of Natural Resources, designed posters for the manatee campaign made famous by singer Jimmy Buffett and started a wildlife graphics and T-shirt business called SCENE 1. He operated the business in Hopland, Calif., then moved it to New Mexico and later Virginia, looking for a slower pace. In Virginia, the Roanoke Times and World News asked of him, "What kind of person would wade near a pool of alligators, ship in poisonous frogs and buy a dangerous scorpion just to get a good T-shirt design?" Johnson and his wife, Karen, wanted to get back to the West Coast and wound up with their two children in Ashland. When he's not busy in his day job on the assembly line at Pro Tool Corp. in Ashland, he designs wildlife T-shirts for a California company and works at honing his computer art skills. His taste in artists runs from surrealist Salvador Dali to author/birding great Roger Tory Peterson to underground cartoonist Rick Griffin. He traces a continuing fascination with the red-tailed hawk to a moment worthy of the book. He was jogging through the rolling hills of vineyard country near the Bay Area on a sunny day when a sudden shadow moved over him. He looked up, still running, to see a red-tailed hawk following low overhead. Backlit by the sun, its tail glowed rusty red, fracturing sunbeams into shafts of light. "He was staying right above my head as I ran," Johnson says. "I don't know what he was doing, but I sure liked him doing it." The experience lasted only a moment but left an indelible impression, another gift of a bird. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA