A Snohomish artist’s whimsical sketches have drawn a crowd

SNOHOMISH — Should birds wear shoes?

It’s a question philosophers have pondered since dinosaurs levitated and sprouted wings.

Now, a Snohomish man has an answer: Yes.

Jim Sorensen didn’t intend to draw a kiwi wearing black-and-white saddle shoes, but that’s the vision that popped into his brain and flowed out of his pencil two years ago at an annual art retreat.

“It was so weird that ever happened,” said Sorensen, 70. “It was not planned by any stretch of the imagination.”

The kiwi was joined by color pencil drawings of a stork sporting wingtip shoes and a raven laced into high top sneakers.

Sorensen’s wife, also an artist, posted the sketches on Facebook and — floof! — Birds In Shoes was born.

Two years and 13,000 Facebook followers later, Sorensen is flying high.

His whimsical birds are for sale as imprints on T-shirts, stickers, posters and shower curtains, and now, in his book, “Birds in Shoes: The Art of Jim Sorensen.”

“I bring in maybe $4,000 a year” through Birds in Shoes, he said. That amounts to grocery money with enough leftover to buy new pencils.

On a recent afternoon, in a small basement studio at his Snohomish home, Sorensen was bent over a slant board, pairing a white-winged cross bill with Birkenstocks.

Tins of colored pencils — his medium — sprawl across the desk within easy reach, arranged in the seven colors of the rainbow.

Above him, two wall shelves were crowded with books, painted skulls and tiny wooden mannequins watching him work. For close-ups, a pair of magnifying binoculars hung on a peg.

“I usually draw in the afternoon until my eyes get fuzzy,” Sorensen said. A playlist of 500 songs — only tunes that lighten his spirit — keep him company. “It’s a Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals and Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of “Across the Universe” make the cut.

Sorensen grew up in Nebraska and then attended art school in Denver after a three-year tour of duty in Vietnam. He moved to Bellingham in the 1975 after reading about the city’s Fairhaven district in a Sunset Magazine. There, he practiced scrimshaw and made engravings on bone until he tired of it.

Eventually, he stumbled into a career as a corporate trainer and traveled the globe. His career spanned 40 years, with clients that included Boeing and Microsoft.

“I’ve been to 47 countries and every state in the union,” Sorensen said. “It didn’t leave much time for art.”

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and his career came to a halt, forcing him to retire earlier than he’d planned.

Suddenly, he was at home and faced with an abundance of time.

”I’ve read that if a person doesn’t find something that inspires them, they die within three to five years after retirement,” Sorensen said. “My mom was still working three weeks before she died.”

“She would say, ‘Jimmy, I think if I quit working I will die,’” he recalled. “It gave her the Why. The why to get up, the why to keep on going.”

“I was afraid it would happen to me,” Sorensen said. “People go from 9 to 5, and all of a sudden they have nothing. They’ve never had a hobby.”

The pandemic and the political divide it opened up also took a toll, leading him to the edge of depression.

As an antidote, he went back to the drawing board.

“When I draw all that goes away,” Sorensen said. “The only thing that exists is this whimsical bird in front of me. I really think drawing birds in shoes saved my butt during the first year of the pandemic.”

He begins by researching his bird.

“I find out what’s unique about it. I find out what bugs they eat, their anatomy, their history. I put something in that’s real and something to amuse myself,” he said of his renderings.

He’s taken a few requests for drawings. A woman whose father was a military man and loved eagles, contacted Sorensen and asked if he’d draw an eagle wearing Western boots.

“Up to the day of his death, he wore the same lace-up Western boots,” Sorensen said. “In the hospital, they tried to put him in slippers and he would only wear the boots. Those kinds of things make it more valuable for me, the emotional things and the weird things.”

Oddly enough, Sorensen is not a bird fancier.

He has never kept chickens, carrier pigeons or fussed over a cockatiel in a cage. Nor is he a birder, bounding through back yards and forests with binoculars dangling from his neck and a life list in his pocket.

“I’m into the artistry of birds,” Sorensen said.“I think when God finished with creation, he had extra time on his hands and he did bugs and birds.”

When he first began drawing birds wearing shoes, there were some who predicted he’d run out of fowl “really quickly,” he said.

Hasn’t happened.

“I think I could draw birds for a hundred years,” Sorensen said. “The variety and beauty of birds is amazing. I don’t think I’ll ever run out of birds,” he said.

His current to-do-drawing list runs to 167. And with the roughly once-a-week production rate he maintains, that’s three years worth.

But what about shoes?

They seem also to be in endless supply — sandals, spats, moccasins, Mary Janes, glossy dress shoes. Shrimper boots on a pelican, a galoshes-clad great blue heron.

Sorensen has branched out and drawn birds wearing slouchy socks, knitted caps or, in recognizing their natural majesty, left them largely untouched.

Take the Vietnamese thick-legged chicken. It has a pair of shanks so chunky, you’ll instantly understand why Tyrannosaurus Rex, surely a descendant, ruled the earth. Scrawny bird legs they are not.

“Their feet are so amazing I couldn’t put shoes on them,” Sorensen said, “so I just painted the nails.”

Janice Podsada; jpodsada@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3097; Twitter: @JanicePods.