Those Insects, That Paintbrush

American Lady and Common Buckeye. 9x12 inch acrylic painting by Ken Januski. Copyright 2020 Ken Januski

I'm not sure how many months it's been since I stopped printing and started acrylic painting. If I weren't in the middle of using the Blogger interface to write this I'd check.  And I actually am a bit curious myself since  I think that change occurred some time after Covid-19 stay at home orders.

In any case I keep being tempted to return to print but that temptation  is overwritten by the desire to keep painting. At top is  a newly finished painting  of an American Lady and Common Buckeye. It is based on photographs I took. But as you can probably see I wasn't too limited by that. At least I hope that's the case. Between covid, hot and humid, or just plain rainy weather I've spent little time in 2020  working outside. When I bought a number of pre-stretched canvases to paint  on I actually envisioned working on some in our backyard. It's almost September and no  such luck so far.

Because I've felt a great degree of freedom in returning to paint, and painting in acrylic I've been very tempted to move from birds to insects, just to see if a bit of freedom with them might also make for results I like. That is certainly true with the American Lady painting. I'm quite happy with  it.

The Stream Blue painting was begun over and month ago, and stopped soon after, as I mentioned  in my last post. I had some freshness in it and I wanted to keep it, regardless of what detail I might be losing. One thing about damselflies is that they are very small, and their primary shape, that of a toothpick, is hard to get all that excited about. It's  also hard to get very painterly with. 'Hmm, which way shall I  flourish  the  brush on this  toothpick?' But  after finishing the American Lady painting  I decided that I  wanted to see what I could do with adding some detail(which is about the only way to identify  dragonflies, especially damselflies) while still keeping it a painting, not an illustration.

Below are the results so far. I should add that there was a flurry of damselflies here when I saw them, mainly a large collection of  males pouncing on the few females who arrived at Papermill Run. You almost need binoculars to even notice the frenzied behavior. Without them you might think that you're just looking  a  calm, almost bucolic stream. I wanted to get that sense of frenzied activity in as well. For me that means that there is just going to have to be some abbreviation in the painting. Painting every single pair along with all the solo males in detail might show a lot of detail but it  certainly wasn't going to represent the experience of seeing this.

So this is my attempt so  far. I'm not sure how much further I'll go. I have added more detail on the two primary damselflies but I'm reluctant to do much more.

Stream Bluets at Papermill Run. 9x12 inch acrylic painting in progress by Ken Januski. Copyright 2020 Ken Januski.

One additional thing I've been thinking about as I look at my old prints and think about new ones is that printmaking  is mainly about lines and edges. Not being a printmaker or  having much training in it I'm sure more experienced printmakers will say: what about lithography, what about this or  that? I think  it is true that lithography  comes close to painting  and certainly gets away from line. If I had a printmaking studio with all the equipment for printing lithos I'd  probably give it a try. I don't. The fact is that most of my printmaking, especially moku hanga, is primarily linear.

There's nothing wrong with  that. And I'm certainly happy with what  I've done. But as I go  along painting insects and birds as I'm currently doing I can't begin to see how I can translate them into prints or moku hanga in particular.

But  I've never worried about such things. Go with the artistic flow, and be thankful if  you have one! For now it's Those Insects and That Paintbrush.

I just looked at this outside of Blogger. It looks like crap. Thank you Google and Blogger. I'm sorry but I don't have time at the moment to go back and try to fix all the bad HTML that the new Blogger  interface so kindly forced me into using.

 

The Most Important Thing in Wildlife Art...

Osprey in Tree. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

is getting a sense of the life and movement of the subject. A bold statement I suppose and one that many would argue with. But for me I'll quickly say that if I can't see the whole bird, animal, insect or whatever in a piece of wildlife art I'll quickly surmise that the artist is working from a photo which does not in fact show the entire subject and he's loathe to try to imagine what he can't see. It's easier to just crop everything out and hope that the flat, abstract design will be appealing enough to counter the fact that the artist has not shown how the weight of the subject is distributed, where the body is moving, where the eye is glancing, etc. It almost never is enough to counter that huge loss.

I say this mainly because I'm very familiar with it. It is the problem that stopped me cold when I first started wildlife, specifically bird, art. I was completely unsuccessful working from life, mainly because birds wouldn't sit still. And my own photos, the only ones that it seemed right to work from, almost always left part of the bird hidden. Even today it's a great treat to be able occasionally to be able to see the whole bird. I think that is one of the appeals of shorebirds. Often you can see the entire bird. As a bonus it often sits still.

In any case this lack of knowledge of the entire bird still stops me from choosing to work from over 50% of the photos I've taken. The only mitigating factor is that I now have about 7-8 years experience sketching from life and I've learned enough about birds to make a good guess as to how the bird fits together, even when I can't see everything. But the most thrilling photos I take are the ones that show the complete bird in an intriguing posture. Those pictures are irresistible and I want to try to capture some sense of the movement in them.

So when winter comes and I spend much less time outside, especially sketching outside, I often will concentrate on doing sketches from my photos which show the full subject, mainly birds, but often insects and other subjects. All of the brush sketches on this page were done in the last week or so. And in almost all instance I did them because I could see the entire subject.

For me this will always be far more exciting, whether in my work or in some one else's, than the most elaborate reconstruction of feathers. It is the life of the subjects I see that I want to understand and portray, even when I work abstractly, and I just cringe when instead I stumble upon well delineated feathers and feather tracts. The latter may be beautiful but rarely does it have any sense of life.

American Copper, American Lady and Common Buckeye. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Osprey in Flight. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Purple Finch Eating Crabapples. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Red Knot. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Red Knot and Semi-palmated Sandpiper. Brush Pen and Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

Zabulon Skipper. Brush Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.