That Magic/Tragic Moment in Printmaking

Northern Mockingbird and Carolina Chickadee. Working Proof Linocut by Ken Januski.

It's been awhile since I've done a print that is strictly black and white, the 'black' of the ink and the 'white' of the paper. It's refreshing to do one because I have to stay simple. There is none of the complexity of color.

Most of my black and white prints have had what seemed to be a greater amount of black than white, so that the print never seemed too light. But every once in a while in a print there comes a moment when I cut away just enough to turn the print from a darkish print to a lightish print. As I thought this over after initially posting it I realize that the real problem is not just that it becomes a light print but that it becomes a print so overwhelmed by the white of the paper that there is no longer any tonal variety. Worse, there is little likelihood of getting it back because too much of the wood or lino has been cut away, much like cutting too much away from a sculpture or coering up too much white paper in a watercolor.

If the cutting that turns it into a largely light print works, i.e. doesn't lose all tonal richness it's magic.If not, it's tragic, in which case I might need to try all sorts of things to try to regain more tonal richness. Because too much of the wood or lino is gone and the print is dominated by the white background it's very difficult to fix. Often the only solution is to take the print off in a slightly different direction.

I foresee this moment and try not to reach it, unless I know from the start that I want a light print. In this case I didn't. But I also knew that I had to keep cutting away in order to keep the focus on the birds and not  on the background. Then poof! , the print went from darkish to lightish. In the end I decided that this was fine.

The scene really was the birds among many small limbs and twigs on a overcast day. So this is pretty true to what I'd orignally seen. The print is nearly done. I just need to clean up a few background marks, but not too many. Past experience has taught me that it's easy to remove too much. If I do the print will go dead  as a doornail. That tragic moment will arrive.

I'm sure some printmakers will be puzzled by this. You shouldn't have such a problem if you  plan out where the lights and darks will go before you start carving. I'm sure this is true, if that's the way you work. But for me much of the appeal of printmaking is its improvisatory aspect. I don't like things all planned out beforehad. If that was my goal I could just as well work in many other media. The nice thing to me about printmaking is that it lends itself to improvisation. As I've mentioned before I was greatly comforted reading Wildlife in Printmaking by Carry Akroyd to see how many of the printmakers featured there loved the improvisatory aspect of printmaking. It is a dialog, not a monolog.

I've now made the minor cleanup I've mentioned and the painting has not taken a tragic turn. So now it's on to a small edition on good paper.

Surprise Me!

Deer, Green Heron, Wood Ducks. Linocut Proof by Ken Januski.

Deer, Green Heron, Wood Ducks. Watercolor sketch by Ken Januski

After the last very complex lino/woodcut I felt like looking at the work of some other wildlife artists working in print. Out popped Wildlife in Printmaking , by Carry Akroyd from Langford Press. I've read it a number of times since receiving it as a present at the end of last year. One of the most common themes is that many if not most of the artists represented chose printmaking as their medium because they like the element of surprise in it. That really rings true to my experience.

Though I don't think any of the artists in that book use this exact phrase printmaking forces you into a dialog with the print. That is much of its appeal. Who knows why. You'd think that an artist would like to be in total control. But it's the element of surprise I think constantly thrown up by the process that keeps it interesting.

In any case I did do a bit of planning on the first proof of a linocut at top. I did this partially because I've never drawn or painted deer of any sort, or really any mammals. So I did a watercolor study of it below, another of the Green Heron and Wood Ducks also below, and then a wash watercolor above trying to get some idea of a composition that would work and include all of these characters. The  lino is based on the wash watercolor, though its initial inspiration came from the Conte sketch of the last post.

Green Heron, Wood Ducks. Watercolor by Ken Januski

White-tailed Deer. Watercolor by Ken Januski

I'm not exactly sure where this will go. I'd like to keep it simple because I have an idea for a different, more complicated lino/woodcut in the back of my mind. On the other hand printmaking always has those surprises so who knows. One thing I do know is that this is not a moonlight scene with reflections in water. I need to do something to change that. And of course once you know that color and multiple blocks of various materials are always an option it's easy to consider using them. At the moment though I think it makes sense to keep this simple. Just one color on one block. Time will tell............

Thoughts On My 500th Post

I don't spend a lot of time watching such statistics as how many blog posts I've made. But I did notice that I was inching toward 500 and so I've paid a bit more attention. This is number 500. Above are some sketches from one of the very first posts. The following is a very lengthy post. Most likely I'll add no images other the ones above. So I know that this post will lose most readers somewhere along the line. Still it seemed like it was worth writing.

So what have I learned over 500 posts and more than 6 years? That I talk too much?! That's certainly possible. If so I think I can trace it back to high school when I and two friends would go to a local diner, order only coffee, and then sit all night philosophizing and arguing. Who knows why the waitresses didn't just throw us out? Maybe we provided entertainment. I'm sure we were considered a bit odd. Setting that thought aside though I think there were a couple of things I originally wanted out of this blog: a place to write about my experiences in nature, particularly while birding, and a place to show my incipient bird sketches.

I'd decided to turn to naturalistic art, primarily birds, at the same time I began the blog, so I had only the vaguest idea of what type of naturalistic art I'd do. I think that at the beginning I expected nothing more than tentative sketches and illustrations of things I'd seen. Since I really had no background in naturalistic art I knew that they were going to be tentative.

Since I have a number of advanced degrees in fine art and had spent much of my life as an ambitious, if not equally successful, fine artist it's no surprise that I soon wanted to do more ambitious work with nature as a subject. I wanted more than tentative illustrations of what I'd seen. I also soon realized that there were all sorts of people blogging about nature that were far better and more experienced and more motivated than I was. I found that I was more passionate about art and probably a bit more unusual in this passion. So my posts turned to my own nature-based art, rather than nature itself.

This will get very boring if I go step by step through my very slow progress. Some recent reading has fortuitously summarized many of the themes of my years with naturalistic art. The books are: The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw, Wildlife in Printmaking by Carry Akroyd, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: the Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson, American Wildlife Art by David J. Wagner, American Birding Sketchbook by Michael Warren and Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct by Adam Duncan Harris.

I don't think too many readers of this blog are as interested as I am in art, the history of art and making a living as an artist. Even fewer from what I can tell are interested in what is called 'modern art', something I mentioned about a month ago: 100th Birthday of Abstract Art. Still it's always been an undercurrent in most of what I write. I think about it almost every day.

To make a long, and possibly boring, story short: I've always been quite conflicted about my background as an abstract artist and my new interest in representational art, especially what's often referred to as 'wildlife art', a type of art often despised by the galleries I used to desire to show in and one generally given very short shrift by the establishment art world of which I used to be a part.

If I were to summarize my experience I'd say that it has been a greater and greater appreciation for at least some wildlife art as well as greater and greater criticism of contemporary art, so much so that I'd say it's become almost anti-art. The books mentioned above all are indicative in some way of this. I don't think by any means that they are the only books that would lead to this conclusion. They're just all very good books and ones that I happened to be reading over the last few months that all seemed to reinforce my thoughts and feelings.

One of the first things I noticed in my bird art was that I didn't understand their structure. What did all those feathers do? Were they all the same? Was their any similar pattern in the feathers of both sparrows and gulls? I still give most small birds a neck that they don't have, stretching it out far more than I should. So over time, and over many questionable drawings and paintings here, I've learned something. Much of this has been helped by field sketching, something I was horribly unsuccessful with until I started frequenting the Wildlife Art section of birdforum.net, which at that time had numerous artists who were fully devoted to sketching birds in the field. I say 'at that time' because this forum I'm afraid has paid the price of Facebook desertion and quieted down  quite a bit.

I've written much about the value, and thrill, of field sketching so I won't repeat it here. What I would like to note though is Katrina van Grouw's book, noted above. I'm not quite finished with it yet but it's a unique and wonderful book on the structure of birds, particularly their skeleton, with many, many drawings by her coupled with an excellent text on why certain birds seem to differ structurally from one another. All the hard earned clues that I've picked up about how birds are put together are also here, along with many I've not yet picked up, portrayed and explained both in text and illustration. Not everyone will enjoy looking at the musculature-skeletal structure of birds but I think anyone who's observed birds closely will. Evolution is a main theme, along with convergent evolution, which indicates unrelated species that seem to have both adapted in the same way so that they look like they're related. It really is a fascinating exploration of birds and their structure.

My very first bird works were vigorous charcoal drawings based on photos of birds I'd taken. But I soon saw that photos only showed part of birds and I was at a complete loss as to what was happening in the blurred, indistinct or hidden parts. I knew from the start that I didn't want to fudge this. But neither did I want to be limited by it, i.e. I didn't want to end up doing scientific illustrations just to show I understood the structure. I think what I find so rewarding about this book is that it helps to crystallize my understanding of the structure of birds, and show how closely it is related to their lifestyle. That type of knowledge is easy to keep in mind in any type of bird portrayal, realistic or abstract.

So that is one thing that I think this blog has touched on, over and over, trying to understand how birds are put together so that whatever work I do, no matter how abstract, looks like I'm actually familiar with the birds and haven't just picked up some random photo and started copying.

Another theme is background and environment. Birds don't exist in a vacuum, nor does any living creature. And subjects in art don't either. One of the first things you should learn as an artist is that you can't just plop your subject down in the middle of the canvas or paper and expect it to be exciting. All in all I'd say that this is the biggest mistake of wildlife artists, the one that most makes their work dull. Many people, probably far more than you'd imagine, are capable of making a passable rendering of birds, animals or just about any other subject. But just as music is not just melody, or not just rhythm, art is not just a subject realistically portrayed. Compostion is an extraordinarily important part of art.

I was very well aware of this in my abstract art. Matisse famously said that his paintings were done when everything was in its proper place, i.e. every little bit of the painting was important. Because I firmly believed this I had a very hard time with the poor or non-existent composition of so much wildlife art. One common solution was the vignette, where the subject is in the center, surrounded by a light halo that fades to nothing as it reaches the edge of the paper or canvas. I myself have tried all sorts of impressionstic, slightly abstract backgrounds, none very successful. I quickly realized that this was another major aspect of naturalistic art that I needed to contend with.

So much of this blog, either in word or in the art itself, has been about my attempts to compose bird art. Both the Bob Kuhn and the Michael Warren book have been interesting to read and view in this regard. Though Kuhn worked for many years as an illustrator and thus almost by definition had to include more or less realistic backgrounds he was also good at composition. When he dropped illustration work at age 50 to devote himself to fulltime paintng he eventually minimized the background to where it was almost abstract. I confess I'm really new to his work and hadn't seen much of it until I got this book. So I'm reluctant to say all that much about him. What I know is from reading this book and looking at the art involved. But he has surprised me by showing an unexpected solution to composition and environment in wildlife art: minimize it but based on what you know. He does a wonderful job of making believable backgrounds and environments that are quasi-abstract.

Michael Warren on the other hands goes in the opposite direction. Often his work especially in the book mentioned above, devotes more space to the environment than to the bird. What is most shocking, pleasantly shocking, is that he seems to have paid attention to the surrounding environment. All the trees, limbs, foliage, water, rocks, etc. look right. And yet they're not photorealist detailed renderings ala Robert Bateman, but something I much prefer a fresh, more abstracted version of them. So much realism seems musclebound, as though it can't break free from the chains of minute detail. Warren's work shows the same knowledge of the environment but portrayed, at least to me, in a more artistic way.

In any case both books have been revelations about how to situate a bird in its surroundings and on paper or canvas in such a way that it both seems believable and also has all the excitement of the best art. I'm really not sure which direction my own work will go from here. But both of these artists show high quality examples of two very different directions. And they both illustrate another theme that has been very important to me throughout this blog. I should add that though I think my talents lie more in the line of Kuhn I'm partiularly impressed with Warren's accomplishments.

As I've struggled with being a 'wildlife artist,' I've often wondered why some artists work the way they do. Why the slavish devotion to photographic detail, a truly stultifying style of art most of the time. A somewhat surprising answer came to me via David J. Wagner's book: to pay the bills. I've never made a living as an artist, abstract, wildlife, or anywhere in between. The best I did was teach art at the college level for a few years and that is far different than making a living from your art.

When you're trying to make a living from your art things are a bit more complicated. The fascinating thing about his book is seeing how this has played out through history. We tend to forget that people didn't always have sporting vacations in the Adirondacks or anywhere. The notion of 'sport' is relatively new. In any case various artists, from Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate to Winslow Homer, were able to make their living by portraying the wilderness that was being explored for 'sport' in 19th century America. I know Homer better than Tait and for him I'd guess it was an easy enough subject since he personally enjoyed it. Still if there hadn't been a market for it perhaps we'd have a different Winslow Homer. Bob Kuhn too happened to paint African wildlife just at the same time that there was a market for it, especially from safari hunters eager to remember their adventure.

By contrast the early Bob Kuhn as well as many other wildlife artist had only one way to make their living in the early to mid 20th century - magazine illustration. Coming from the art for art's sake tradition, where it was almost suspect to make a living from art, I tend to forget that many artists had to do what their clients wanted. The great British artist Charles Tunnicliffe seemed to have commissions almost all his life, even at at time of great fame.So often artists have had to do what they were paid to do, not what they might have personally wanted to do. Kuhn's paintings after age 50 are far stronger than his illustrations but it took him until then to believe it was safe to risk his economic well-being on art as he wished to do it.

There are of course other influences on art mentioned in the Wagner book, including the many artists, such as Louis Agassiz Fuertes, who made their living more in the scientific sphere. Another book on wildlife art whose name I don't recall offhand mentions how many wildlife artists didn't begin painting the way they wanted until they retired from scientific jobs, often with natural history museums or universities. I'm not sure that this makes me like some of the work anymore but it does help to explain why wildlife art is the way it is. For me that has been important because I've always felt like the round peg in the square holes of wildlife art.

Another theme of Wagner's book is the long history of conservation and environmentalism in wildlife art. That too has been interesting and rewarding to see. And it brings up an interesting question. What is more important, liking the style of another wildlife artist or sharing some kinship with his concern for wilflife even if rendered it a thoroughly different or even distasteful style? There's no obviuos answer to this but it is something I've often thought about. I can admire many things about Robert Bateman's paintings but I rarely really like them. On the other hand I thoroughly admire and like him as an enviromentalist.

These previous books, at least for me, help to explain my place in wildlife art, something that I think has been a major theme of this blog through the years. I've always been uncomfortable in the role of wildlife artist.

The last theme is the other side of this: my relation to contemporary art and the state of contemporary art.

If you've made it through this far, in what surely is my lengthiest post, I'll reward you with the postive first. I love much of modern art, for example Matisse, Cezanne, Stuart Davis, Mondrian, Richard Diebenkorn to name just a very few. My hope when I began wildlife art was that I could use a modernistic style with a naturalistic theme. I wish I could show you a book by the very talented Nick Derry but the best I can do is show you this link to his Nick Derry Facebook page. Carry Akroyd's printmaking book mentioned at top shows some artists who I think do exactly this. Many are members of the Society of Wildife Artists and this help explains why I've spent huge amounts of money to send my work for their last two annual exhibits. It's the only venue I know of that seems to combine modern art and wildlife art.

One artist who is particularly successful at this I think is Kim Atkinson. Some of her work is in the Akroyd book. One theme that I think is particularly interesting is what I'd call synesthesia. the use of one sense, or medium, to evoke another. Early abstract artists talked about this as a goal, where their art also evoked music among other things. One or two of Atkinson's works include sound in their title. And I think that's exactly what modern art is capable of. It is capable of portraying, or evoking, the sense of spring, including the chatter or birds, the smell of lilacs, etc. So this book reminds me of what has always been a goal of mine, to keep the broad expressiveness of modern art in my representatiaonal art.

I think this is more often a goal than an accomplishment and often I work more traditionally. But it is a huge, if underlying theme.

Finally we have contemporary art, and the cost of art. I dropped abstract art 10-15 years ago out of disgust with the contemporary art world. I'm only more disgusted now. But I no longer spend any time with it so it's not so bad. From a distance I've theorized as to what seems so wrong with it. I've also theorized as to why you'll never see wildlife art in an art musuem and rarely any galleries other than 'wildlife art' galleries. My conclusion was that contemporary art is now strictly a world of finance and financial speculation.

This is not to say that all artists believe this but my own experience with art schools is that art students quite eagerly follow the leader, even if the leader is a 'shocking' artist. So everybody is 'shocking' together. I can't prove any of this and don't want to spend the time or energy doing so. But I did fnally decide to read a bit about it. The Don Thompson book is revelatory. It's mainly a reporting book rather than a critical analysis, i.e. he's not as appalled as I am. In fact he's an occasional collector himself. But it does show how the contemporary artists who sell for millions got where they are. It shows the tremendous monetary incentives for artists, dealers, auction houses, museums and collectors. To me it's a sick world. There's no other way to put it. Art is no longer important and money and prestige are. Contemporary art is bought, and sold, for financial gain and/or to keep up with the Jones, the hedge fund manager Joneses.

This really isn't of much importance to me, except that I think it does degrade the long and honorable tradition of art. Of course I could be accused of philistinism, but who hasn't over the last 150 years? It's an insult that no longer has meaning. But what's saddest about it is that there are so many legitimate artists, including many wildilfe artists, who will never sell, never be shown in museums or galleries while instead the stuff mentioned in this book will, most selling for over one million dollars.

I'm not going to go on any futher with that particular depressing theme. What I've found interesting in the book is that it makes me feel more strongly than ever that today's art work has nothing to do with art and has no place for me in it. In other words it solidifies my convicition that today I'm truly wildlife artist.

With ALL of that said perhaps my future posts will deal less with thoughts about art and wildlife art and instead just concentrate on my artwork and the nature that has inspired this. If you've gotten all the way through this: CONGRATULATIONS. I know it's been very long and self-referential.

The Process of Art

As I've continued reading Wildlife in Printmaking by Carry Akroyd from Langford Press two things have struck me: one, how many of the artists represented use their sketchbook as the source of their art, and two, how many consider the process of printmaking as important as the subject.

Anyone who's not an artist might wonder what I mean by process. What I and most of the artists mean I think is that the surprises that come about as you develop the print are just as important as any plans that you might have had initially as to how the print would develop. When I  was interviewed for Printsy, the printmakers of Etsy, a couple of years ago I said that one of the things I  found that I most liked about printmaking was the element of surprise. That still holds true and I was surprised to see how many printmakers  have the same feeling. It is somewhat like an improvisatory art.

I could theorize forever about why this might be but I leave that to others. I don't know. But I  do know that I  very much like it.

At top is a watercolor study composed from three field sketches done at Higbee Beach at Cape May last October. It epitomizes Cape May in fall to me with raptors floating overhead and butterfles and dragonflies keeping to the lower level. This is just a compositonal study, most likely for a color reduction linocut.

Above are two field sketches. At top the Red-tailed Hawk is from  Morris Arboretum yesterday.  The Great Blue Heron and the upside down Red-bellied Woodpecker eating poison ivy berries is from the Manayunk Canal today. The second sketch is also from the canal and shows a Pied-billed Grebe from memory, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet eating a moth, and a totally unexpected Green Heron off on the far side of the canal after I moved too close to try to get a better view for a sketch.

Recently we've seen many Red-bellied Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers hanging upside down eating poison ivy berries. We also saw a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker doing the same thing last winter. This is a difficult pose to get right. So I've done the sketches above from photos I've taken of Red-bellies and Flickers. My hope is that such practice will help me to do more accurate drawings of these woodpeckers when I see them in the field.

As with the watercolor at the top I hope to develop a painting or print from the sketches. That's one of the wonderful things about many of the prints in Wildlife in Printmaking. They don't just capture the bird. They attempt to capture the entire experience. And they also improvise along the way,  based on what their medium tells them. The result is joyous art.

Taking a Chance

Many years ago when I first started taking art courses in the San Francisco area, even though I'd made art on my own since I was a child, there was one course that was a revelation to me: Oriental Brush Painting, as I think it was called. What was so unusual and revelatory was the importance of the brush mark. Each mark was important, not just the overall drawing/painting/impression.

This was made even more noticeable in the actual practice of painting.  The rice paper we painted on had a consistency similar to toilet paper. The black ink on the brush seemed to leap off the brush, even before it touched the paper, and form an indecipherable blob rather than the graceful mark I sought. What this taught me I think is that it's possible to make art that contains the most graceful and expressive marks, which are themselves a major component of the art.

This course was only one semester long and I never began to master it. Still I've never lost my appreciation for it. So when I took  up watercolor, after only the briefest foray into it as a student at Berkeley, I was quickly  reminded of the importance of marks. Watercolor is not as absorbent as the rice paper I used to use but still an inelegant mark can show up as just that: inelegant. It's much harder to cover over such inelegance as you can in oil or acrylic.

On the other hand some of my  favorite watercolor artists such as Winslow Homer did seem to cover over areas. As far as  I can tell Homer really wasn't all that interested in elegant marks. And no one can argue with his success as an artist. He's probably my favorite watercolor artist.

I mentioned in my last post how the realism of the sketches I've done recently  might soon be replaced by more abstract work, especially since I started reading Wildlife in Printmaking by Carry Akroyd. That is exactly what has happened in the 9x12 watercolor above. It revisits a familiar theme: shorebirds at high tide on Nummy Island. This one includes a Red Knot, as well as Short-billed Dowitcher, Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin.

In it I've tried to keep more of the white of the paper, to accentuate a variety of marks, and to avoid too much detail in the birds, or anything else for that matter. I've always liked more abstract art and the Akroyd book reminds me of how much I like that sort of art. When I used to be an abstract artist I'd always use a musical analogy to try  to explain it to befuddled onlookers. Most people don't demand that music tell a story or paint a picture. They react to the non-verbal music itself, to the melody, rhythm, etc.

These are also important elements in art and are often noticed most in decorative arts though not completely. Architecture also makes much  use of pattern and rhythm. When you use something like that in a  painting you  have to decide whether to sublimate accuracy for rhythm and pattern. I've made a first attempt at that here.

Over the last few years I've occasionally  made a painting that drifted in this direction then scuttled back to the safety of realism, which of course there's nothing wrong with. But my artistic background has always been much more appreciative of marks, of pattern, of design. So once again  I'm taking a chance on that direction. This time I hope I can stay with it a bit longer.

My linocuts I think do tend much more in this direction. But I've wanted to do it in painting  for quite awhile and keep getting scared off. Hopefully this time will be different.

Harriers and Mockingbirds

Ninety minutes of 30 degree birding at Morris Arboretum on Sunday reminded me that much of my field sketching is going to be on hold for the next 4-5 months. I could barely get my fingers to move enough to jot down what birds we saw, let alone sketch them.

During the winter my sketches will be done very quickly. Often I've tried to do field sketches of Northern Mockingbirds in winter. Generally what strikes me is a very long torso and tail, or a very dark eye, or a very long  bill and I'll try to capture one of those in a sketch. But then I'll come home, look at some photos and wonder where I got those ideas. So this fall when I took a photo that showed how long the torso of a Mockingbird can be I was quite happy. I've sketched that at top right above. I've also added the dark eye in most of the above sketches. The bill isn't really that long but it may be that a dark line in fron of the eye merges with the bill to make it look longer. If you look at the leftmost sketch though you  can see how I can get confused. Here the Mocker looks more like a rounded grapefruit than a very elongated bird.

I'm never happy with any attempts to do finished drawings from photos. They also seem lacking. But for understanding the structure of a bird, particularly if they show the whole bird and in good light, the sketching can be informative.

Northern Harries are quite different than Northern Mockingbirds in that I only see them on vacation. They're not a normal part of my local landscape like mockingbirds. They're magnificent birds to see but I almost never try to draw them as they drop down, lift back up, glide along then dip again, in constant movement. This year however I took my first photos at Cape May and also did a few brief sketches. The sketch above combines two photos of the same bird into one sketch. I've always admired other artist's drawings of harriers. It's nice to finally have my own.

Yellowlegs are also a vacation bird primarily though they're occasionally at Morris Arboretum. They're more regularly at Tinicum but I just don't have the time to drive down there that often. So this was another opportunity to try to learn their structure, and complex patterning, a bit better.

Finally we have the ubiquitous Northern Cardinal. Ubiquitous but impossible to draw from life. I'm not sure why this is unless it's the fact that the backyard ones are easily spooked. And then there is the black on the face of the male that I never seem to get right. Like the mockingbird they seem sleek one day and pot-bellied and heavy the next. I liked the way this photo gave a good sense of their structure so that was the impetus to do this sketch. They should be regulars in the backyard this year so maybe I'll finally do some decent field sketches.

That really is the purpose of these ballpoint pen sketches from photos I've taken: to understand the structure of certain birds so that I can do a better job when I do field sketches of them.

I recently received the wonderful book 'Wildlife in Printmaking' by Carry Ackroyd from Langford Press, publishers of the best wildlife art books in the world at least by my standards. As I've flipped through it I realize that the art I love is not limited by realism. It often takes great liberties with it. But it is founded in observation and knowledge of both the bird/animal and its surroundings. So I don't at all want to be trapped by the realism of these sketches, something quite easy to do I think. I hope that the knowledge I've gained will soon show itself in some much more abstract work, most likely in lino.