Birds From Two Circles

Black-throated Green Warblers. Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

In my last post I mentioned the two-circle method of drawing birds mentioned in John Muir Laws' Laws Guide to Drawing Birds.I've always been skeptical of simplified methods and shortcuts such as this. And yet you do have to start somewhere. Since I spent many years greatly exaggerating the length of necks in many birds I decided to try the two-circle method. Maybe it would prove helpful.

All of the ballpoint pen sketches in this post were used with that method. All in all I was pleasantly surprised. I can only guess how well this might work for a beginning bird artist but based on the good reviews of the book I'd have to guess that it works well for many. The best part about it to me is that it forces you to connect the head to the body, not just placing it on top of the body but actually taking away part of the space of the body, which is what it really does. This tends to create a more organic shape.

Black and White Warbler and Belted Kingfisher. Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Each winter I seem to eventually break down and do some sketches based on photos(always my own), just like the ones on this page. I thought I might be able to avoid it this year but exploring the two-circle method of drawing birds gave me the excuse to take it up again. I just find it very melancholy to work from photos. What life is there in a photo? I'd rather be outside seeing the bird in real life. Still it is also a learning exercise and hopefully I've learned something in such sketches and will be able to apply it in more developed work or in field sketches.

You could say that the two pages of sketches above, in an 8.25x11.75 Stillman and Birn Epsilon sketchbook are in the illustrative tradition of bird art, one that tries to portray birds accurately. I think that's correct, though for me it's not so much about portraying them accurately as internalizing what they  look like so that I can feel free to take artistic  liberties.

During the many years I was an abstract artist I often likened my work to music especially jazz. I wasn't interested in an literal interpretation but the more abstract one of music. This is partially what I was talking about when I mentioned the importance of theory in art. Perhaps I should have said formal consideration rather than theory.

I ran across a nice explanation of this recently in skimming The Enjoyment of Music by Joseph Machlis:

In expanding and manipulating his ideas the composer treats the tone material in the manner of a sculptor or goldsmith: he molds the material, deriving inspiration from the stuff in his hands, allowing it to dictate forms and shapes peculiar to itself. He is engaged in a kind of thinking possible only in music, one that has its own logic, its own procedures and meanings; a thinking that cannot be duplicated in any other medium. For this reason is it so repugnant to most musicians to have literary interpretations forced upon a piece of abstract music...

Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin. Pen Sketch by Ken Januski.

Just as music has its own language so does visual art. And that language is far more than realism. It is an abstract language of shape, color, composition, tone, texture, pattern, light, space, the actual feel of the material used. It is an interest in all of that language that I often find missing in illustration. I mention that here below the sketch of Black-bellied Plovers and Dunlin because what attracted me to them was the formal elements: the shape of each bird, the patterns they formed, the relationship of one to another. I didn't really pursue that here but in the back of my mind is always the thought of using the subjects as inspiration for the formal language of art. As Machlis says about music it is a language unto itself and it is most expressive when it is not limited by setting photographic verisimilitude as the highest goal. My hope here is that in understanding the forms of birds better I'll be able to create art with them as the subjects.

The Big River of Art

Northern Mockingbird, Carolina Chickadee, Carolina Wren. Field Sketches by Ken Januski.

Northern Mockingbird and Carolina Chickadee. Pencil Sketch by Ken Januski.

Northern Mockingbird and Carolina Chickadee. Linocut by Ken Januski.

A few posts ago I threatened to write about my recent reading, something I really don't do too much, though the Journals of Delacroix have proved an exception. Sometimes it seems so foreign to art itself. You might also say its removed from birds and nature.  Reading is obviously more thoughtful, unless you're deep in some page turner.

Almost all of my reading has been about art or wildlife art, with a solid detour into music. And it's hard to write about art without getting into aesthetics. That in turn brings up the famous quote from artist Barnett Newman:

Aesthetics is for me what ornithology must be for the birds.

It's easy to understand the concept: some non-practicing artist forces some sort of theory upon actual art and artists and it rarely fits. Even the Impressionists didn't consider themselves an artistic movement.

The odd thing, as my reading of The Journals of Delacroix convinced me is that I can't resist  thinking about art and wildlife art. That seems to also be true of Delacroix and I think that's why his journals are so popular both with myself and more than a century's worth of readers. In fact for Delacroix is not just art but all the arts, from Mozart to Rubens to Racine and Shakespeare. He can't help but thinking about them in relation to one another. They're all creative endeavors.

Reading Delacroix and listening to the audiotape The Great Courses course on How to Listen to and Understand Music remind me how important theory is in art. Perhaps not for everyone but certainly for me.

This was emphasized from the opposite direction by my reading of a very popular new book on drawing birds, The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds. I have read about this book for more than a year but could never convince myself to buy it,  or place it high on a list of possible gifts I'd like. Why? I never liked the illustrations I've seen from the book: birds constructed of one circle, for the head, placed on top of another, for the body; and uninspiring more developed sketches.

Nonetheless after reading too many good reviews I decided to buy it. No matter how much you know about either drawing birds or identifying birds there's a good chance that you can learn something new. To my great surprise I learned a lot. Laws is a very good observer of birds. Many aspects of bird structure that I've only begun to notice after years of struggling with sketching them appear as short notes in the book, for instance the emargination of the outer primary feathers.

As I read the book these astute notes puzzled me a bit though because they are so advanced compared to the circle upon circle drawing method. But you can't argue with all the good reviewers. Many seem to find the book useful on many levels. And after my second reading of it I really am impressed by the amount of knowledge that is revealed in it. It should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the structure of birds.

And yet.............I couldn't help thinking about other books on drawing birds: Drawing Birds by John Busby. Looking at Birds: An Antidote to Field Guides, also by John Busby, and Drawing and Painting Birds by my online acquaintance Tim Wootton. Tim's book is probably the most similar book in terms of goals, to teach people to draw and paint birds. But what a difference! I can look at Tim's book over and over and enjoy the artistic qualties of the work by various artists, many of them also online acquaintances of mine(I add this just in case there's any unknown bias on my part). I don't enjoy looking at the Laws book.

I was also surprised by the Laws book when I read of the bird artists he admired: John Busby, Tim Wootton, Bruce Pearson,  Nick Derry, among others. A very large number were the very same bird artists I most admire. Still I think the illustrations in the book don't show much evidence of this love, perhaps because the author really had a different goal  in writing the book. Though it is refers to 'drawing' in the title, 'illustration' is often mentioned in the text of the book. In the end I think that explains why I can't get too excited about the works themselves: their goal seems to be illustration not art.

The subject of illustration versus art is almost always on my mind. It seems endemic to any artist who chooses to portray wildlife as I do. Another online friend, 100 Swallows, recently got me thinking about this when he wrote about Norman Rockwell in his blogpost, Rockwell on Main St. This in turn convinced me to read the new book on Norman Rockwell, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon.

I confess that I've  never liked Rockwell. But I also have never looked at him. 100 Swallows' blog and Solomon's book have given me the opportunity to look at him in greater depth. Rockwell rarely if ever considered himself an artist but rather an illustratior. And yet the Solomon book indicates how often he felt he might be a failure because he hadn't pursued art with a capital A. Many wildlife artists that I've read about earned their living as illustrators but chomped at the bit to ditch illustration and turn to art with a capital A. One of the few who did successfully was Bob Kuhn.

Regardless of the ambivalence that Rockwell or any other artists felt about illustration you can't deny that narrative has been, can be and probably again will be a major part of the art wtih a capital A that gets shown in museums. I still really can't like Rockwell's work, just as I can't most of the more realistic wildlife artists. But I can appreciate the honest desire to portray either narrative or likenesses. In this Delacroix is well worth reading.Over and over he mentions how contemporaries of his fall short due to their obsession with detail. If only contemporary big cat painters would look at Delacroix's cat paintings to see how to paint art that that is not just illustration. I'm tempted to say that one thing Delacroix has and many illustrators don't is imagination. And yet that is one of Rockwell's strongest qualities, his imagination. Perhaps only history will come up with an objective view of him.

I suppose we all have biases that we will never overcome. One of mine is against a weak-kneed irony that seems incapable of taking a strong stand for or against anything. I can't forsee my ever abandoning my intense disllike of art that is based on irony, particulary of the clever type. I am biased toward abstract, what a critic might call designy,  art. But I understand the desire to portray what one sees and to tell stories. All are part  of the big river of art. It has been many things over the course of human history and it will continue to be.

And like nature, it is one of the most worthwhile and rewarding things that is available to humans. I hope that readers of this who like art but not nature and vice versa, will consider that they might be far more similar than they'd guess and just as rewarding.

And on a less theoretical note: the photos at top show the development of my new Northern Mockingbird and Carolina Chickadee linocut. The top photo is a field sketch of those birds as well as a Carolina Chickadee. It is followed by a sketch for the lino based on the field sketch. And finally the finished print, printed in an edition of 15 with Daniel Smith water-soluble ink on  Rives Heavyweight paper.