Recent Work - Moku Hanga, Watercolor, Field Sketch

Yellow-billed Cuckoo with Worm. Moku Hanga print by Ken Januski.

It has been a very long time since I've posted anything here. One reason is an old one: I tend  to  write more  than make art on this blog. Though I  obviously  have an interest in thinking  about things, especially artistic things, I often feel that is to the detriment of  actually  making art. So a year ago or more I decided to limit my writing here.

A newer motivation is  both a seeming lack of  interest from readers and moreso a belief that most viewers are interested for the wrong reasons: hacking or some other motive not related to my art. This isn't just paranoia. It's based on reading the stats of who visits, who links, etc. The great majority are from countries known for their hacking, especially for the purpose of  identity theft, or from sites that aren't legit. This  didn't use to be the case but it  is now. So I have no reason to write posts for  hackers and others who just aren't interested  in anything I want them to be interested in.

Of course a lot of  this came about as social media became more popular. I finally relented and joined Facebook a few years ago, mainly to have access to some artists whose work was hidden without a Facebook logon and perhaps a friend request. I didn't like any of this but I finally decided to try it. All in all I'm not unhappy. But Facebook reminds me of what I used to call 'snippet journalism', journalism whether in print or online or television that was too breezy and short to be of much value.  There is something there but it certainly isn't the more developed, thoughtful discursive material that is available in something like a blog.

So perhaps blogs will return to popularity. But I used to think that eventually print, especially printed newspapers and magazines would make a comeback. It seems crazy to me that this has not happened but there's no doubt that is has not.

So.............I'm just going to show some recent work here, though without a lot of  theorizing.

At top  is the finished moku  hanga print of 'Yellow-billed Cuckoo with Worm.' Traditional moku hanga includes very finely painted,  carved and printed lines. Contemporary moku hanga has largely abandoned line for color fields. This makes sense for various reasons, but I  still miss line. So below you see a trial proof of the same print using lines just on the cuckoo. Another proof shows only color fields with no line  at all. The color  field proof was done much  earlier in the process and the linear one as I made the final edition.

My long history with abstract art has taught me that you really have to be careful about precious areas of  a painting, areas that can seduce the eye but that don't add much to  the entire painting or print.  There is  an aesthetic that says that this is just fine but it's not MY aesthetic. The proof without lines has a lot of areas I  like but they just don't fit with my idea of the  print. The proof below with minimal line was my attempt to keep the color fields and just use the most essential line. But in the end I decided that I needed all of the lines. It took a long time to come to this decision but I finally did. And I'm happy with it.

Yellow-billed Cuckoo with Worm. Trial moku hanga proof by Ken Januski.

Yellow-billed Cuckoo with Worm. Early state moku hanga proof by Ken Januski.

All of my work desires spontaneity in some form or another. And I rebel against too much detail and too much adherence to what something looks like. On the other hand, especially with wildlife art and particular species, I can't very well just ignore the specifics. So I try to do what I can to learn them but to let the actual prints and paintings look spontaneous, or at least not constipated.

Further down on this page are some field sketches I did  at Cape May a few weeks ago, mainly  of  Sora, Virginia Rail and Wilson's  Snipe. I wanted to capture the actual scene of Sora and Virginia Rail all together, constantly moving out of view and back into the reeds. The sumi brush pen and watercolor painting below is the result of  my attempt to capture the scene, be spontaneous but still be at least somewhat true to what the species actually looked like.

Inevitably this will not have the detail or the realism of more fastidious detailed work. But other than as a learning tool I have no interest in painting in such a manner. And I think my prints show that this is also true with them. In any case I'm happy with this  12x16 inch painting.

Juvenile and adult Sora and Virginia Rail. Brush Pen and Watercolor  painting  by Ken Januski.

Since the day I started wildlife art, specifically bird art, over 10 years ago I knew some things I didn't want. I didn't  want portraits, where cute animals were centered on the canvas or print as though posing in a photographers studio. I didn't want cameos either, where the bird is in focus and the background just fades out into mist. I also didn't want a totally flattened picture plane, with cropped subject and an interesting design. I used to admire this in Degas and in Japanese prints, including some moku hanga. But  today it seems easy and a bit too decorative.

I also knew, how could I forget, that I didn't want labored art. I'm always shocked at how artists, especially wildlife artists, will talk about how much time they spent on their work. Who cares?  That 's a bad sign not a good one. To me the best art looks effortless, regardless of how much work went into  it.

So I had a huge list of what I didn't want my art to look like. One thing I've realized is that I do want a sense of life, a sense of artistic knowledge and ambition, and more and more a sense of space and depth. The latter is not inherently good. It's gone in and out of artistic fashion over the centuries. But to me it seems to be a way to help the subject open up, to help it breathe. It seems to me that especially in wildlife art the subjects should breathe!

So that is what I attempted to  do in the 12x16 inch  watercolor below of a Black-bellied Plover and two Dunlin below. It's quite simple and has an extraordinarily  limited palette for me. It also leaves a lot of white space, something that is harder than anything else for  me to accomplish  in watercolor.

Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin. Watercolor painting by Ken Januski.

As I said above I still like to be able to portray my birds and other subjects with some sense of accuracy. The best method for  that bar none, is to work from life. I may not get the detail that I might if working from a photo but I get a sense of life and I also learn to make decisions about what is important in my subject in the brief seconds or nanoseconds before it moves. Because of that I always enjoy the chance to draw birds from life.

It is  still a bit difficult to do, especially with rarer birds, when my camera is hanging around my neck ready to use. And I do use it. But it never has the thrill of sketching from life!

Juvenile Sora. Field  Sketch by Ken Januski

Sora. Field Sketch by Ken Januski

Virginia Rail and Common Gallinule. Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

Virginia Rail Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

Wilson's Snipe. Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

More Brush Drawings

Black-bellied Plover. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

As I was working on the wash drawings for the last post I realized that I had two advantages in them that might make them more likely to be successful. First I was working larger, about 9x12 in a Stillman and Birn Delta sketchbook; and second, I was using shorebirds for subjects. Why are they easy? Because unlike many birds, especially warblers, you can see the entire bird.  Most of it is out in the open, not hidden by leaves or gone due to quick movement.

So over the last few days I've tried some other subjects. The American Redstarts and American Wigeon are too bad to show. After a bad morning with the wigeon I went back to shorebirds this afternoon. These are done in a much smaller 5.5x8.5 Gamma sketchbook from Stillman and Birn. Because of that much smaller size I had to work somewhat daintily, a method pretty foreign to me. (The following morning I did another set of Black-bellied Plover wash drawings. They are at top).

Still it was informative. When I was an abstract artist, even when I did figure drawings contemporaneously, I tended to work large. When you're drawing 22x40 or so you can make sweeping gestures with your arm. Make a sweeping gesture with a small sketchbook like this and you're quickly off the page and knocking something over perhaps your watercolors and water bottle.

So at this scale you have to make marks differently. But that is good. Like learning more about yourself by traveling in a foreign country you learn more about your subject by drawing or painting it at different scales. Hopefully I learn to conceptualize it. If you learn the pattern or structure of birds you've learned something that works at all scales and media.

So that's my justification for showing these tiny little sketches. Each bird is probably 2x2 inches or smaller. But one of the wonders of realistic art is that it doesn't take much, perhaps just two or three marks, to create the illusion of something. No matter how much 'progress' is made in art, or how many new media replace old media, there is always the magic of illusion. It's magic to the artist and to the receptive viewer. I get far more excitement out of seeing someone bring forth an eagle from just a few brushstrokes than I do from seeing someone who's rendered most of the eagle feathers in great detail. Which really is more magical? Or to quote Aristotle, which one creates the most delight?

I'm not sure where all this will lead. Many of my recent woodcuts have used simplified outlines of the birds portrayed. I think the simplification required in working with wash will help me in simplifying in other media. In the meantime it is a lot of fun. Except for those passerines, obscured by leaves.

Oh yes, these are based on photos I've taken. I wish I could walk down the block and find shorebirds to sketch from life, but outside of the occasional Spotted and/or Solitary Sandpiper or Killdeer they are very scarce around the immediate vicinity. So I'm using the photos I've taken over the years.

Runny Ink, Watercolor, Waterbrush Sketches

Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin at Two Mile Landing. Ballpoint Pen and Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

Black and White Warbler at Carpenters Woods. Ballpoint Pen and Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.
 

I decided to experiment with the runny ink from a Pilot Precise V5 ballpoint pen, watercolor and a watercolor brush that I used the other day in an American Redstart sketch. I suppose you might call this Fast and Lazy Watercolor.

Due to the fact that I really can't change the ink line once it's down and to the fact that I'm using a waterbrush, whose water load is limited, instead of watercolor with a normal watercolor brush I'm very constrained in what I can do. In some ways it's like a potato bag race - limited but quick. Well maybe not so quick in the potato race. In any case there are severe limitations in terms of artistic handling.

But because of that I can to a lot of sketches. They stay spontaneous and they also let me work through a lot of ideas quickly. In this case I'm a bit more tempted to pursue another more developed work with the shorebirds rather than the warbler.

The Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin were some of the few shorebirds we say at Cape May last November. The Black and White Warbler on the other hand was one of many, many warblers that we saw at Carpenters Woods in Philadelphia earlier in May.

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.

Preliminary Show

With two big shows in November it's somewhat surprisng to be in another one in October. This is a smaller one, the Member's Show at the Manayunk Roxborough Art Center, a few blocks from our house. In it members of the art center in general can show not just the members of the Artists Coop. For me it's a good opportunity to show work that I might not put in November shows, e.g. 'Killdeer with Worm' above, a 12x16 watercolor, or works I've just finished and am eager to see hanging, e.g. 'High Tide at Nummy Island', a 9x12 acrylic below.

There is some possiblity that not all works will be hung because you just never know how much work will be submitted. If there's too much then not all work will go up. On the theory that there will be enough room though I'm also submitting the work below, a watercolor titled 'Great Black-backed Gull at Flat Rock Dam.' This work seems to be among my most unpopular recent works, at least judged by certain criteria. It was rejected from the 4th Annual Juried Show at MRAC this summer. It tops the list of least visited works at my Etsy store. Almost no one has bothered to look at it. And yet I like it quite a bit and it was well received when I showed it online when I first did it. In the end popular response is not important. I like it so I'm submitting it. I just realized I also showed it at the recent Manayunk Arts Festival and it got little response. Perhaps it's too dark, with a barely visible bird, and even a dark mat. Who knows? As I said it's something I like and it captures the scene of a huge gull dwarfed but seemingly unfazed by the giant dam behind him.

The Magic of Light

Just recently I needed to complete a resume of my artistic career and also create an Artist's Statement for an upcoming show. One of the notable parts of it was the fact that I've done abstract art since grade school. As I thought about it I realized that I've always preferred abstract art, from grade school through graduate degrees in college and beyond.

When I tried to think of contemporary representational artists who had influenced meduring my artistic training two stood out: Elmer Bischoff, with whom I studied at University of California, Berkeley, and Richard Diebenkorn, a fellow Bay Area Figurative Painter of Elmer Bischoff's, though by now a far more famous  one.

Even the White House currently  hangs an abstract Diebenkorn. This Diebenkorn is from his earlier Berkeley series and not the later, and really magnificent, Ocean Park series. When I was in California and studying with Bischoff it was his contemporary abstract paintings and those of Diebenkorn that really struck me. I'm sure I did many bad imitations!

Nonetheless I also was thoroughly taken with their ink and wash  figurative drawings. Both seemed to portray light as solidly as if it were a Yosemite rockface. I was competely entralled with this and also did many  poor imitations in my figure drawing classes.

I didn't turn to representational art until about 10-12 years ago, first with insects, then six or seven years ago with birds. Occasionally my love of light will surface in that work. That is partially what happened in the ballpoint pen drawing at top. It's based on a photo, which in itself seems to do something with light in terms of capturing it and making it solid. I do feel it's cheating in a way to use it as a source. But I've always loved the photos I've taken of shorebirds on Nummy Island last spring..The birds are Black-bellied Plovers, Short-billed Dowitchers and Dunlins.

The combination of light, variety of shapes  and bills, not to mention color makes this scene one that I keep  wanting to portray. Here I  did it with the intention of just getting  down the shapes of the different birds. Inevitably I also tried to capture the sense of light.

Art can be many things. Though as I've said I've spent so much of my artistic career as an  abstract artist I can't help but stand in wonder at the way  some artists capture light in naturalistic paintings. I think that Diebenkorn captured light in  his abstract paintings but it seems to me to be a rare accomplishment. For that representational artists as varied as Hopper, Vermeer and Constable are always  the best examples. And a very strong reason  to work representationally. I'd have to say that for me there's  not anything much more moving than light captured in art.

Some More Traditional Watercolors

For some people it may seem illogical to think that abstraction in art can only happen after the artist understands realism. Perhaps it's better to say that you can only simplify after you know the complexity of a subject well enough to simplify it, leaving out inessential parts. Until you're really familiar with the subject it's hard to say what's essential and what's not.
Some abstract/modern/non-objective art of course never understands the subject and isn't really interested in doing so. I'm not going to judge whether this is good, bad or neither. But for myself I've found that I do like to understand a subject before I simplify it.
So often I'll use photos as a basis for a painting if I think it will help me learn the birds better. I'm not sure that this works all that well. But I think that there is a mental process of trying to understand the structure of a bird that you see in a photo that can help in understanding. That's particularly true in the second watercolor which I'll show below. But it's also true in the watercolor at top, 9x12 inches on Arches 300# cold press paper.
This is based on the type of scene that I love, a variety of shorebirds. We rarely see the endangered Red Knot but we saw a number at Cape May this year, mainly on Nummy Island near Stone Harbor. He is at right along with a Short-billed Dowitcher, a Dunlin, and two Black-bellied Plovers in a variety of plumages. I hope that as I paint more shorebirds I'll get comfortable enough with them so that I feel free to simplify and abstract when the notion takes me.

I think that the breeding bird I see most often in summer, if I discount our yardbirds of House Finch, House Sparrow and Robin, as well as the ubiquitous Gray Catbird, is the Acadian Flycatcher. It's not really a common bird, but it is common in some areas that I bird, particularly Wissahickon Creek.
I've done many, many field sketches of it. Today I saw 4-5 and did more field sketches. And yet I feel that I still don't have it down. What is the shape of the head? What is the angle of the bill when seen from below as is so often the case? In an attempt to understand the structure a bit better I did the small 5x7 inch watercolor above. It looks very familiar and I think that's because it's one of the best Acadian Flycatcher photos I've taken so I've used it often. In any case that is the goal of the watercolor above. The new photos I took today of a bird perched just 6 feet away will also be used more than once I'd guess. But soon I think I'll be able to get an accurate field sketch and will no longer need photos.
I think some birders would get bored with the Wissahickon in spring and summer. Just the same old birds. That may be. But until I've mastered sketching them they're always a great opportunity in my eyes. There is always something new to see.

Toying with Abstraction

A few posts back I showed a small experimental watercolor of a number of shorebirds, almost all of them Dunlin, landing. It was an idea for an entry in the Bike Art show at Manayunk Roxborough Art Center. My thought was that the sense of dynamism was similar to that of a bike race, especially going up the Manayunk Wall and also at the sprint to the finish line. Limbs and wheels are flying everywhere just like the Dunlin wings, bills, legs.
Though I liked the watercolor I wanted to try another one that was a bit larger and more developed. It is at top of post. It's about 9x12 on 140# Arches cold press paper in watercolor and white gouache.
Some viewers will I think appreciate this, some will think it's a valid idea that just didn't get executed well, and some will wonder why I waste my talents with naturalistic art doing something like this. It's mainly for the last group that I'm writing this.

Above is an abstract oil painting that I sold to the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, now part of NASDAQ, a little less than 10 years ago. It's representative of most of the artwork I've done in my life, before I turned from abstraction to naturalism. I don't want to write a treatise on it but will just mention Matisse's quote about a painting being an orchestration of elements with everything in the right place. I always liken my abstract art to music. It is an orchestration of color, shape, texture, composition space that all adds up to something expressive, just like music.
When I turned to naturalism it was difficult to leave all that power of expression behind. Of course I gained something instead, the ability to portray nature, and thus gain all the expressiveness of nature. I'm happy I went in that direction. But sometimes I feel like there's something missing, that I'm speaking in Latin while the world converses in the Pidgin English of the web. So this bike art show gave me the chance to explore once again the melding of naturalism and abstraction. We'll just have to see what happens from here.
By the way the title of the abstract painting is "Short Arthur's Oblique and Non-stop Song", in honor of the jazz musician Arthur Blythe. I told you that I likened my art to music!

Dunlin, Pro Cycling Tour, Perpetual Motion, Creedence

When I was a young ARTIST I had no patience with rules, with constraint, with tradition. Real artists innovated. Since then I've come to realize that this romantic notion is probably one of the most harmful in the last 150 years of art. Art doesn't come out of nothing. The best art, and you can easily see it in people like Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse to name a few modern ones, struggles to both digest and improve the best art that comes before it. Sometimes these struggles can be painful to watch. I remember grimacing at some very early Cezannes. But he was just trying to come to terms with what went before to eventually portray the world as he saw it.
So often I think constraints and tradition are good. Sometimes it's the challenge of fulfilling a specific commission that seems most likely to bring out the most invention and creativity in an artist. You need something to react against.
On the other hand some artists including the long suffering Michelangelo might just as soon boil their patrons in oil. I've never studied Michelangelo's history closely. But it's the impression I've picked up. His patrons, particularly the papal ones, took a lot out of him.
If you think that mentioning Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Michelangelo in terms of my own work is grandiose you're right. But I had to think about the idea of constraints in art when my local art center decided that the theme for the next show in June would be 'Bike Art'. I once spent a lot of time riding bikes, often in bad weather up steep hills. I live near the top of the famous 'Manayunk Wall' that is a big part of Philadelphia International Championship, and the reason that there's going to be such a theme for the show.
So I definitely have some sympathy with bicycles, though more with riding than racing. Still I've been in no hurry at all to come up with an art work based on bicycles. I didn't want to work with the constraints of 'bike art.' Eventually the theme was broadened to motion, activity, sport so I thought I might be able to do something based on birds in flight that would work.
The results are at the top, a small watercolor and gouache of part of a Dunlin flock coming in to rest in shallow water. My photo that this is based on shows a remarkable orchestration of wings, legs and torsos. How in the world do they land together without horrendous crashes? There is also a tremendous sense of motion and activity. So that's what I've tried to show here. My brushwork and composition is deliberately rough and frenetic. I've never understood finely detailed renderings of frenetic activity. It has a frozen quality to it that I just can't enjoy.
So that was the idea behind this. I've worked on it three or four times over the last five days. It may be done; it may require a lot more work; and it may end up in the trash bin. I need some time time to digest it and publishing it here always helps in that process. I really didn't want to do this painting. But now that I've spent some time on it I see that it's forcing me to try something different, to be more abstract than I normally am with birds. That's what got me to thinking about constraints in art. Sometimes they can be far more liberating than you ever would have guessed.
As I was finishing the current state of the painting I was enjoying some background music on the radio. I had switched from my usual classical station to an independent rock station. The lyrics 'perpetual motion' were floating about. They seemed perfect for this scene. I had the vague feeling that the performing artists were Creedence Clearwater, a group I've always enjoyed passively, and that turned out to be the case. I've never bought their music and don't know much about them. But I do recall that I almost always notice their music when it's on, and always enjoy it. Thus the rest of the title.

Blizzard Bread

Well I don't think anyone is making any official estimates yet but my guess is that at least in our part of Philadelphia we've gotten about 48 inches of snow over the last 5 days. Today we both stayed home from work due to 'blizzard warnings.' I'm not sure I've ever even seen a blizzard warning in my 25+ years here. Blizzards occur in Chicago, where I used to live, or Ithaca, where I also used to live, but not in Philadelphia. I've forgotten what snow and winter really are due to my 25 years here.

But no more. This is real snow!

I don't think I've ever shown food on this blog before, and unless you can squeeze the wild yeasts of sourdough bread into the nature category food isn't really art, birds or nature. Sourdough needs to be fed in order to be used for baking. So you can't just say: hey I'll make some sourdough bread today! You need to feed your starter for a day or two.

I had been doing that and it was ready today. And I was home all day. So time to make some sourdough bread. In this case I decided to make foccaccia, loosely based on the recipe in my bible of sourdough baking, "Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery." The day many years ago when I decided to buy that book and learn to make sourdough bread was a life-changing experience. It took about 2 weeks to nurture my first starter so that it was strong enough to make bread. That was probably 10 years ago or so. Since then every winter is the time for sourdough bread.

But today I wanted to do something special: not just bread but foccaccia. Our cupboards are a bit bare so smoked turkey replaced anchovies, and cheddar cheese replaced Parmesan. Leftover broccoli raab, the last of some oil-cured olives and a lot of sesame seeds topped it off. A beautiful bread for the day of a blizzard.

Earlier in the day I worked on some dunlin sketches. I did live field sketches of these same birds at Bringantine NWR last October. But I had tremendous trouble with the slant of the bill in those sketches. Today I attempted to get a better sense of the bill and their overall structure. This is an exercise in learning as much as it is in art. Finally I turned to books by Charles Tunnicliffe, Eric Ennion and Roger Tory Peterson so see how the experts handled dunlins.

Finally a few photos of the snow. Just last weekend I posted a photo of our back yard and the snow on the lawn chair. Now the snow on the chair is almost twice as high and you almost can't see the chair!

Needless to say our birds are having a very hard time. The strong wind and snow instantly cover any food put on the ground and the feeders only hold so many birds. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather for the birds.

As for us I'm sure it's going to be one long, slow drive into work, if I can find the car in the snow.

Doodling with Mozart

Today is Mozart's birthday so the local classical and jazz radio station, WRTI, is playing his music all day. It was a welcome accompaniment to my sketches of Dunlins and Greater Yellowlegs, most in flight, at Heislerville WMA. These and all the sketches here are based on photos I took over the last year.

I use doodling in the title here because although these are studies as well and try to be accurate they're also a type of subconscious artistic stretching. I draw what I see but in the back of my mind I'm exploring what might be done in more developed works with the various birds I sketch.

Included are Dunlins, Greater Yellowlegs, Common Eiders and Scoters, Coopers Hawks and a Brown Thrasher. They were done over the last week.

Shorebirds in Flight

Even John Busby in his wonderful book about drawing birds from life, 'Drawing Birds', concedes that photography has allowed artists to see things that they haven't seen so well before. I think birds in flight is one of these. Though even there you can find examples, and he does in his book on Eric Ennion, of how an accomplished artists can still do a better job with his naked eye. There is a thrill in capturing movement actually seen firsthand that is not matched in working from photos.

All of which just leads up to the obvious: the watercolor pencil and watercolor sketch above is based on a photo I took at Heislerville WMA in April, 2009. Shorebirds are just not that familiar to my wife and myself, though they could be if we'd drag ourselves out of Philadelphia and the fewer than 100 miles over to Cape May more often. Nonetheless when we do get to see shorebirds it is a great experience. They are subtly beautiful birds in themselves but their story of lengthy migrations and the movements of whole flocks at a time all add up to make them one of our favorite bird types.

So when I got some decent photos I couldn't resist trying to make some sort of art from them. I'm recovering from a truly horrible virus of some sort and so this is the first new work in a week or so. I thought I'd use watercolor pencils for my first attempt. I think this was a combination of just wanting to continue to explore watercolor pencils and the added detail that they can bring to a painting. Because they begin as lines they are much easier to control than a brush, at least for anyone not accomplished in watercolor.

Knowing that I was going to try to be drawing birds in very confusing postures due to being caught at a moment in time by the camera I wanted all the help I could get. So drawing seemed a good idea. And I think it worked for getting some of the shapes.

BUT the still water has again defeated me. I tried to render it in watercolor pencil, then wash. When that looked bad I abandoned my vow not to go back into watercolor pencil when it was still wet and eventually went into it with abandon. Not much help. Finally, as a last ditch attempt, I went to straight watercolor. I didn't totally kill the surface as I did in the Greater Yellowlegs skecth of a week or two ago. But that's about it.

So there's still this dilemma with me and watercolor pencils. How in the world do you make a convincing area of large still water? I'm sure I'll continue to experiment. I'm obviously disappointed with the background and so I thought about just not posting this. But I am happy with getting some sense of the Short-billed Dowtchers and Dunlins in flight though, so I decided to post it for that reason. Shorebirds in flight are mighty impressive.