BBC Wildife Artist of the Year 2012 - Finalist

Last year in early May our exciting visit to 'The Biggest Week in American Birding' at and around Magee Marsh in Ohio was made even more exciting when I received an email saying that I was a finalist in the 'International Artists' category for BBC's Wildlife Magazine Wildlife Artist of the Year. There was a bounce in my step as I lugged all my birding and sketching gear around Magee Marsh!
I had noticed that many people had announced their finalist status on their web sites. But I didn't want to jinx a good thing, nor come afoul of an etiquette I might not be familiar with, so I didn't announce my finalist status online until the final judging date was long passed and I hadn't heard from BBC. At that point I was happy to advertise that I'd been named a finalist.
This morning I got another surprise email - I'm a finalist again in the International Artist category! If you do a quick web search you'll see that a number of others have been as well, somewhere over 100, and many have announced it. So I'm less hesitant this year to say that I'm again a finalist, this time for one of my favorite linocuts, 'Ten Terns', seen above. I think it represents me fairly well as an artist.
Final judging will be this week. I'm hoping for the best. Here is a link to the 2011 winners, complete with their work. By the way this has been a good week for 'Ten Terns'. It's also featured in Wildlife Art Journal's Gallery of the Commons. At the moment this article is available to everyone but it may change back to being available only to subscribers at some time.

More Warbler Sketches in Ink

Our trip to the Biggest Week in American Birding at Magee Marsh in Ohio last spring was memorable in many ways. At the top of the list though was the number of migrating wood warblers in full breeding plumage that seemed to be everywhere.

I did stick to my plan and try to do as much field sketching as possible. This is always difficult when you know you probably won't get such good looks at some of these birds again for many years. Wouldn't it be better to just take photos? Well that certainly was a temptation but I'm proud of myself for sticking with my plan and doing numerous field sketches. I also took photos but I concentrated on sketching.

But winter always seems to be the time for me to look through the photos that I have taken and do some drawings based on them. So I'm making use of some of the photos I took at Magee of Cape May Warblers here.

The sketches above are based on those photos. In many of them a Cape May Warbler had just bathed in the stream in front of us and had hopped back up to preen and rearrange his feathers. Most of the photos show him in motion and I've also tried to portray that in some of the sketches. It's all part of what birds actually look like.

If you've ever seen a Cape May Warbler in breeding plumage you might wonder how I can stand to portray it in black and white. I love its color though my wife thinks that they're over the top. I'm sure I'll get to something in color eventually but for now I'm concentrating on structure. I can already see on mistake I've made in that in these drawings.

We also got some very good looks at numerous Blackburnian Warblers. I did do a multi-color reduction linocut based on them as well as a couple of watercolor sketches. But it's always good to study their structure again. These sketches are based on Magee photos as well as some from Shenandoah National Park.

And speaking of Shenandoah National Park above are some sketches of Canada Warblers based on photos I've taken there over the years. Some of my very first bird drawings when I took up birds as subject about six years ago were these same Canadas. That was when I first realized how deceptive photos can be and how hard it is to make sense of an unclear area in a photo if you don't really understand the structure of the subject. Thankfully I've learned a bit more about structure during the last six years. Not that there's not still a long, long way to go.

Connecticut Warbler Continued

I didn't really have time to work on this today but just couldn't resist. I was trying to add a little more definition to the painting, to keep the sense of complexity and the hidden quality of the warbler, without going completely toward chaos. In doing so I made the painting a bit darker. But I think this is a better painting and possibly a bit more accurate. There are still a few minor areas that bother me some. Only time will tell whether or not I leave them be.

I'm Ignoring You

No the "I" is not me, and the "You" is not anyone who reads this. My reference is to this well hidden but eagerly sought Connecticut Warbler on the boardwalk at Magee Marsh last week. He is the "I" ignoring all birders.

I'm not the type of birder who goes to great effort to see a new species. I'll make some effort and I'm happy to see them but they're not a treasure hunt worth serious sacrifice. I think this may be a minority opinion. There are a lot of serious life bird searchers out there.

But when someone tells me that there is a rarely seen warbler right in front of me, and down on the ground not out of sight 100' up I'll try to find it, see it, maybe even sketch it. Well I have to say that an hour later when we finally got a good look at this bird we both were ready to quit birding for the rest of the afternoon. This was just far too mentally exhausting!

Why? Well I think this watercolor based on a photo I took shows why. This bird was buried in the ground foliage and forest detritus, much of which was taller than it was. And it wasn't in any hurry to move around and give potential viewers a clue as to its whereabouts. In fact there was plenty of time to just stop and do some preening.

I particularly liked this photo when I discovered that some of my shots had actually captured it because of the extreme nonchalance the Connecticut Warbler showed in the face of at least 50 people at any given time trying to get a look at it. Many were trying to add it to their life list, a rare opportunity right there before them.

I did a lot of sketches of warblers while I was there and showed most of them recently. I look forward to doing paintings or prints based on them. Photos will only be of secondary importance when I work on them.

But here there was only this one photo. After hogging valuable boardwalk space for most of an hour we moved on as soon as we'd gotten a good look and I'd shot a couple of quick photos. It would have been too rude to then sit there and try to sketch him.

But I had to laugh when I saw the photo. So my first work starring the warblers that we saw is based on a photo. This wasn't my intent. But it seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. I tried to give some sense of how buried he was in the foliage. I don't know these warblers and the colors in the photo are confusing. Was it blue, gray, brown, a combination? That's one reason I don't like to paint birds I don't know well. But this one I just couldn't resist, even with the confusion

This is a very busy, non-art week for me. I'd like to go back into this. But I suspect that I won't, at least this week.

A Few More Lesser ......... Yellowlegs Sketches

I took a whole lot of photos of Lesser Yellowlegs at Magee Marsh NWR back in September of 2009. My problems with identifying two shorebirds that I thought were just one are detailed here. One of the consequences of trying to ID the bird at the same time we were trying to hurry to get started on a long drive meant that I took many, many quick photos. Now they are serving as a wealth of material for sketches.

I grabbed 30 minutes this morning and then again tonight to do the two on this page. Slowly, slowly I'm learning something about the structure of shorebirds and yellowlegs. It's of course easy to be seduced by their complex feather patterning, especially if you have fairly detailed photos as I do. I'm going to need to watch out for that as I continue this process because it's very easy to get lost in that feather detail and completely mess up the overall structure of the bird itself.

These two in particular gave me trouble with the placement of the legs. But I'm getting to be more familiar with these birds. Maybe another 10 sketches and I'll start to feel comfortable enough to try another painting of them and the Solitary Sandpiper that we saw at Magee.

Finally, how often to you get to write "a few more lesser" as I did in the title? Life is full of small pleasures!

Vary Your Pitches

I suppose it's watching the Phillies in the World Series recently that caused a metaphor about varying your pitches to spring to the front of my mind. A successful pitcher needs to have a variety of pitches, e.g. fastball, curve, slider, that he uses to keep a batter off-stride thus preventing him from hitting the ball solidly. Of course the purpose of art is not to throw either the artist or the viewing public offstride.

But I've always found that I'm reluctant to continue in one direction for long in art. So yesterday I worked in watercolors. I set a time limit for myself and thought that this might help me to become freer with watercolors, to have them become more natural to me. So I could just pick up and start a watercolor without thinking about it. I was happy with the results. So what did I do today?

I started doing fairly detailed pencil drawings based on photos from Crane Creek and Magee Marsh NWR in Ohio this September. This wasn't due to some perverse motivation on my part. Nor was it , at least I don't think so, the fear of continuing with the method of yesterday.

I really can't explain this. It's always seemed natural to me to approach art in a sideways method. Never go straight for your target - the best art. Instead go off at a 45-degree angle in one direction, then still going foward off at 45 degrees in a different direction. Sort of like moving a heavy piece of furniture across the floor.

Does it make sense? Is it smart? I don't know. But it's what I prefer to do. In any case here are today's results.

I stopped when I realized with the last drawing that I was losing patience with trying to draw some of the detail of the feather patterns. But I have faith that all these various methods of working at art all help to move art forward. Everything you do and everything you learn eventually leads to better art. Somehow it all gets amalgamated. I've already stretched too many metaphors so I won't say anything about the subduction of the earth's crust!

See, ID, Draw, Paint

Or should it be: See, Draw, Paint, ID? These questions came to me on arrival home from a 2700 mile driving trip to the Midwest, particularly Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin and Magee Marsh in Ohio.

I think my brain wasn't fully functioning due to all the driving and much more caffeine than is usual for me. My mind was just sort of wandering after getting home Sunday night and I kept going back to one moment of the trip.

The occasion was a shorebird that I and my wife saw in the mudflats at Magee Marsh just as we were about to leave. It was very difficult to see amidst the mud and the water lilies. When we did see it, it was puzzling. Some of the markings, like the way the white of the breast curves up into the flanks and the monocolor underwings indicated Solitary Sandpiper. But the yellow-orange legs and size of bill indicated Lesser Yellowlegs. We're just starting to get familiar with shorebirds so we were constantly referring back to Sibley for help. That, along with a single call note, confused us even more. Some aspects of the bird supported each ID.

But that was just the start of the problems. There wasn't time to draw, since we needed to be getting on the road in order to reach our next hotel in Pennsylvania before dark. So we both decided to take some quick photos for later reference. Sounds easy right? Until we realized, I more than my wife, that we couldn't find the shorebird once we tried to shoot a photo! Where was he in all that variety of gray, green, brown and blue?



After about 15 minutes of trying to find the bird, then focus him in the camera, and shoot the photo I came to a great realization: there were two birds! They were almost identical in shape, both had eye rings, both had yellowish legs, and they were very similar in size. They even fed in a similar fashion!



The surprise answer to the ID question was: BOTH! One was a Lesser Yellowlegs and the other was a Solitary Sandpiper. I'd seen both, thinking they were the same bird, and came up with contradictory field markings!

All of this was prelude to what I thought about that first night back home though. My thought was that I'd placed seeing and identifying the bird above all else. I could have just tried to see it, sketch it, perhaps use that as the basis for a painting, and then at some later time, maybe when titling the painting, discover what the bird(s) actually was. Someone with my artistic background might easily first see the artistic possibilities for a drawing and painting and only much later worry about an id.

I didn't and that I found interesting. To me it seemed a metaphor for what I've been trying to do in my bird art: remain true to what I see, but also make sure that the end result is artistic, not 'just' a scientific sketch. I put 'just' in quotes because I don't mean to criticize scientific sketches. They are both valuable and beautiful. It's just that I really value art, probably more than science. And yet in this case I put science first. Perhaps this is just due to the fact that we were birding first and sketching second. Still I found it interesting.

I think much bird art swings between these two extremes. For some artists correct representation of a particular bird and species is paramount. For others the bird is just an excuse for 'making art.' I don't mean to come down on one side or the other and probably am smack dab in the middle. This little episode reminded me of that. And I do find it a comfortable and enjoyable place to be!

By the way the watercolor at top is one that I whipped out this morning as an illustration for this post.