First Day of Spring - 2015

Witch Hazel with New Snow - First Day of Spring 2015. Photo by Ken Januski.

Normally I plant peas by St. Patrick's Day, March 17th. But wet soil delayed that task. Just as well as today, the first day of spring, we're predicted to get 3-5 inches of snow, of which at least 3 has already fallen. Above is a photo, out a dirty inside window, of the fresh snow on an Arnold's Promise Witch Hazel.

Temperatures in the 50s are predicted for tomorrow though so my guess is that this is winter's last gasp. It's always nice to see the first birds of spring and I've been out looking for them. Instead I've found the last birds of winter. including the male Canvasback and Hooded Merganser, still at Morris Arboretum where they've been for a few days.

Canvasback and Hooded Merganser. Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

If you work in a number of media as I do pictures often present themselves in your minds eye in a certain medium. Even though I had thought of a print featuring the deep mahogany brown of the Canvasback, and lighter cinnamon brown of the Hooded Mergansers, coupled of course with their striking blacks and whites I instead thought of doing it in charcoal, or perhaps a one color linocut. The contrast in black and white, and rich mahogany of the Canvasback head seen as another rich dark seemed more important than color. Rick black and white is what I thought.

So I returned to an old method of charcoal, both vigorously drawn and erased. Someone once mentioned that an earlier work in this method might work well as a woodcut and a few years later that suggestion is what got me to start linocuts. I've toyed since then with charcoal, and sometimes pastel, but more or less stopped because of the health hazards of the fixative used to fix the colored powder on the paper. I probably won't return to this method. But yesterday I was happy to turn briefly to the striking immediacy of this method. The drawing below is 18x24 in compressed and vine charcoal.

Canvasback and Hooded Merganser. Charcoal Drawing by Ken Januski.

And now I think, it's about time for the birds of spring to replace the birds of winter, beautiful though they are.

Great Blue Heron on Fallen Beech

Recently I complained about the lack of cold and snow in recent winters. Be careful what you wish for as the saying goes. We woke up to 12 degree weather this morning.That's nothing like the below zero weather I grew up with in the midwest, but it is cold!

So this ballpoint pen sketch of a Great Blue Heron standing on a fallen beech along Wissahickon Creek would most likely bring back balmy recollections to the heron if he were to view this. I say this because Great Blues tend to stay here all year, no matter how cold. Though I haven't seen any during the recent cold spell I have a distinct mental image of them from other sightings. Their long scapular feathers seem to hang down their back and transmogrify into the nearby icicles. They fit perfectly into a frozen world, at least as it appears to us. I'm sure the herons have other thoughts.

Above is one of my earliest works using birds as subjects. It was done in 2007 and is based on a photo I took of a Great Blue Heron in snowy surroundings at Morris Arboretum in weather that was in the low teens. It's a very early drawing and I've learned a lot since then about drawing birds. I haven't been very successful in rendering the snow but in my mind's eye it's a good evocation of the very cold world of a Great Blue Heron in winter

On the Easel, More or Less

These two pastel and charcoal drawings are both works in progress. I got to a stopping point yesterday with the Ospreys and so decided to make a bold move and try a subject I'd been thinking about for at least six months - combining a Hermit Thrush and some Sandhill Cranes seen at different spots at Horicon Marsh last fall.

I say "on the easel, more or less" because I don't use an easel. But you get the point. They're unfinished works. Who knows how much more I'll do or where they'll end up?

The ospreys offer less opportunity. There's not a lot to work with. I at first thought I could get the silhoutte-like composition to work by the use of color and texture in the sky. But so far it's a bit dull. Maybe more experimentation with the sky will make a difference.

The more exciting drawing to me is the Hermit Thrush with Sandhill Cranes. They were seen within a few hundred yards of one another but they were never in the same view as seen here. However I've toyed with the idea of putting the cranes behind the thrush for months. I think I felt a bit more experimental yesterday because I'd already worked on the osprey drawing. I'd done my work for the day so now I could goof off with this one.

I'm often tempted to leave some completely white areas in pastel drawings, just as I used to do in oil paint. This is different than allowing some white of the paper to show through to give a sense of light. But I think it is connected. It gives a sense of brightness. However it completely breaks the conceit of illusion. If I leave a complete shape white, for instance the tree trunk at far left, I'm calling attention to the fact that this is a drawing.

If I were showing this in a contemporary gallery I could rattle on forever about how this forces the viewer to confront the fact that all art is illusion, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I couldn't stand to do that. Such nonsense, which is fresh in my mind from hearing about a local 'environmental art' show on the radio, drives me nuts. I'm not trying to educate viewers. I'm not dealing in 'issues'. I'm an artist and my concern is visual. So let's just say my preference for letting white show through like this is just a personal preference. I know many people, including many artists, don't like it. But they never liked my paisley bell-bottoms either. I gave up on those bell-bottoms and I've removed the white from many pastel drawings. But for now I'm leaning toward keeping it here. Sometimes you just have to do what feels right, even if it turns out to be embarrassingly wrong in the future.

One possible problem with this drawing is that you can hardly tell that the sandhill cranes are there. That is one area that will probably get more work.

Someone on the Wildlife Art thread of birdforum said something recently about all artists having different ways of destroying work we're not happy with. Some paint over it. Others cut out just the good part. When I worked abstractly I just radically changed what the painting or drawing looked like until I was either happy with it or felt defeated. I haven't pushed myself that far with my naturalistic work and have instead let the work be and saved any changes for the next version. This thrush drawing might get pushed a bit though. Stay tuned.

Veery With Geology

Recent weather hasn't exactly been conducive to getting out and birding and sketching. Too hot and humid. But if you get out early enough it's not horrible.

While walking along the Wissahickon Creek this week I noticed a geologic formation that is fairly common there, terribly warped rocks that look like pulled taffy. I believe that they're metamorphic, perhaps Wissahickon Schist. For more on Wissahickon Creek geology look here. Since I'd been telling some online friends about the local geology I took a couple of photos.

Not yards away I saw a Veery. I've been hearing them and Wood Thrushes all summer long at the Wissahickon but I'm not sure how much longer they'll be here. I've yet to really track their departure dates. Maybe this year. In the past we've just all of a sudden realized that they are gone and that another winter is on its way.



I recently read a book on American watercolors in the Brooklyn Museum. It was quite enjoyable and informative. At one point there was a contemporary criticism of Homer I believe, though it might have been Sargent, saying that they were very good at portraying what they saw, but nothing more. Uh, oh! Somebody wants IMAGINATION, BIG THOUGHTS, etc.

This has always struck me as bogus. Big thoughts are right in front of you, if you portray what you see. Nonetheless there is something to the ability of an artist to construct scenes based on sketches, photos, memory, etc. I've never been good at this. So this time I decided to put the Veery in the scene of the metamorphic rocks that I'd photographed. The first attempt was the watercolor immediately above.

But the veery was not in the photo. I needed to use another of a Veery I'd taken a year or two ago along with my knowledge of veeries to place him in the picture. I think it turned out better in today's charcoal drawing at the top than in yesterday's watercolor.

That's not all that surprising. I'm much more comfortable with charcoal than with watercolor. But at least I'm no longer terrified of it. And now I have two versions. I'm also a bit terrified of portraying rocks. But these rocks are something special. So it was worth the effort.

Seeing What You Have

It seems like a long time since I've written about improvisation in art, a popular theme of mine for awhile. In the past I've mentioned it in relation to my abstract art which had always been improvisatory. It was something I missed in my representational work.

Today I was reminded of exactly what I mean by improvisatory. I realized that I didn't know what to do with this charcoal drawing of the Great Blue Heron and Belted Kingfisher that I saw yesterday. I would only know what to do once I put some marks down. In other words the drawing develops in reaction to what is already there. But I can't start reacting until I put something down. So in a sense what I put down to begin with isn't that important.

Make sense? I hope so. I think I've always known this but it hit me over the head today when I realized that I really wouldn't know what I wanted to do until I did something!

This style of charcoal drawing lends itself to that much more than watercolor does. It's difficult to react to what you've put down in watercolor and not end up with mud. Work that looks bright and fresh in watercolor seems to require planning. Improvisation is just hard in watercolor. There's an element of difficulty in charcoal in the sense that once you really rub in the charcoal it's hard to get the white of the paper back. But other than that it's a pretty improvisatory medium.

In any case I've been wanting to do some more improvisatory work for awhile. This is the first. I'm not sure if it's done. Sometimes you just need to let something sit and see if it still looks right 24 hours later. For now it's done.

It does continue with yesterday's goal of combining the heron and kingfisher that I saw yesterday into one drawing. They were very close to one another. But not so close as to end up together in one drawing or painting unless they were just small blobs. They were never as close as in this drawing. That juxtaposition is an artistic liberty. Improvisation and liberty in one drawing. Sounds like a good game plan!

Pastel and Charcoal Piping Plovers Continued

These benign looking Piping Plover have given me a surprising amount of trouble over the last week or two. First there was the disastrous watercolor of a week ago. Then over the last two days this combination pastel/charcoal.

The problem really has nothing to do with the plovers. It's the background that causes problems. I'm trying to keep both the brilliant light of the sand and the variations in tone: yellow/ochre and blue. It seems like I can't have both. If I accentuate the color contrast it no longer looks like brilliant whitish sand. Today I had the opposite problem. I erased the pastels enough that there was a more uniform light color. But then it looked dull!



In the last and probably final version above I've made the top part of the drawing a bit darker and richer in color. There was no such orange on the sand or in the photo. The last blue area of shade was not so dark and blue. But I felt that I really needed to differentiate this more distant area from the more sun-drenched area where the plovers stood. So I've taken some artistic license in what I hope is both a good drawing and a drawing that is more or less faithful to its subject.

I have to add that its very overcast today. After I work on the drawing for awhile I take it outside to spray on fixative. What a surprise! A brand new drawing when seen in the brighter light of outdoors. Mainly it's looked dull and monotonous. So that's one more reason that I added the darker, richer colors at top.

Piping Plovers are obviously very beautiful birds. This is the third version of a painting or drawing that I've done based on the photos I took of them in April at Cape May. I think it's time to change subjects for awhile. But I may still try one more watercolor in the future. I'd still like to get them and their surroundings in one brilliantly lit painting.

Pastel and Charcoal Piping Plovers

I wasn't happy with my last watercolor of the Piping Plovers. I've reworked it once again but am not posting it now. Instead I started a new pastel and charcoal drawing of the same subject. I'm a little more confident in my abilities in charcoal, and to a lesser degree pastel, than I am in watercolor.

I'm including the first two versions of the drawing. I'm fairly confident that by the time I'm finished I'll be happy with the work.

World Drawing Day 2009 - Part II

As I mentioned in my earlier post today is World Drawing Day. I'm a big believer in drawing, particularly as a alternative to photography. I won't go into the details of that here. But I did want to take advantage of this in order to force myself to do a number of drawings. It would have been nice to have ended up with some masterpieces. But by the time the morning bird census was done, and a week's worth of grocery shopping done, there wasn't all that much time left in the day.

Earlier I showed a quick watercolor pencil and waterbrush sketch of a clematis in our garden. As we returned from shopping another opportunity presented itself: a dead moth in front of our front door. At one time I did a great number of finely detailed pen and ink drawings of insects, including moths. They were done under a dissecting microscope and took quite awhile to do. Today's sketch is much quicker, done in vine and compressed charcoal and no microscope.

Sad to say I've found moths to be among the most difficult of nature's creatures to identify. After a quick glance through my moth field guide I'd say it looks a bit like a Common Fungus Moth. But I could very easily be wrong about this.




Before starting a new moth drawing though I thought I'd relax for a bit in front of the television and watch the Phillies and Dodgers. Well it wasn't exactly relaxing as it took about three more hours for the Phillies to lose to the Dodgers in the 12th inning I think. Sad to see.

But the early innings gave me a chance to try some felt tip pen drawings from TV. I first started drawing from TV many years ago during the Watergate hearings. It was TV you couldn't tear yourself away from and gave me quite an opportunity. Like that hearing baseball games are difficult in that you never know just how long the same image will stay in front of you. Most last only for a second or so. But it still can be fun to draw. This sketch shows Phillies pitcher Joe Blanton facing a Dodgers batter, I forget who. There are also a couple of other sketches of the game.

None of these are masterpieces as I said. But on this day, World Drawing Day, I hope that they at least show some of the range of possibilities that drawing offers. As this day's logo says: Drop Everything and Draw!

Film Debuts - Highly Condensed Artistic Bio

Many months ago I wrote about some of my drawings being used in a film. 'APeacockFeatheredBlue' debuted about a month ago and was recently in the Atlanta Film Festival. I wish I could have been at the filming and felt more a part of it. But I couldn't so it was with great anticipation that I received a copy of the film a few weeks ago. It was quite enjoyable both to see the short film and to see my own drawings in it. A trailer for the film can be found here. If you look at it you'll see Marcel, the young hero of the film, working on a drawing that I began, at two points in the film. In another section you'll see his mother ripping down two of my drawings from the wall. They are supposed to be Marcel's and are indicative of his problem: spending too much time on art and not enough on his other subjects, particularly science. In the rest of the film he uses his creativity and imagination to try to win the school science fair prize.



I've been a little reluctant to show any of my older, abstract work here because this is primarily a blog about my new work and nature. Since almost all of my recent work is about nature the two fit together nicely. But I also wanted to mention this film, and of course I'm proud of my older abstract work. So the debut of the film seems like a good excuse for including a very abbreviated artistic biography and perhaps showing how my abstract and representational art connect.

It actually was drawings like the one at the top that convinced me I could make the switch from 20 years of abstract work to representational work about four or five years ago. I had spent a number of years drawing insects under a microscope and they can be seen at my main web site. But I hadn't done any of birds and no representational or naturalistic paintings of any type. So it was still a huge jump to doing naturalistic work of the same ambition as my abstract work.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I frequently lament my uncomfortableness with watercolor. But that is not the case with charcoal. The drawing at top was done during a period of almost 10 years where I did abstract charcoal drawings about 8 hours a day, every day. Charcoal drawing is in my blood. So I thought that I might be able to use that knowledge and ability on drawings of birds. The first attempt, of an immature Black-crowned Night Heron, was clumsy but it gave me the confidence to continue. The Pied-billed Grebes, above, is also a relatively early attempt.

I was satisfied enough with the results that I've not looked back. Soon after I'd done a few charcoal drawings of birds I decided to try watercolor. I'd only done a few watercolors as a student at Berkeley, but I remembered liking the medium. I think I was also inspired by many of the watercolors of birds in John Busby's 'Drawing Birds.' I'm nowhere near as ambitious in my naturalistic work as I've been with abstract work but I think that's more a matter of having enough time than anything else. I hope you'll continue to see better results here.

But there is another small part to this story. How did I come up with all of these abstract shapes? Why was I so enamored of shape? Like most artists I've done art since I was a child, including abstract or non-objective art. I remember admiring Wassily Kandinsky as a youth. But my youthful abstractions were largely geometric. Where did all the organic shapes come from?




For that you have figure drawing to thank. I was living in San Francisco working at a very dull job in order to pay the bills. I had moved to San Francisco from Chicago and while there discovered that I really wanted to pursue my childhood ambition of being an artist. But how was I to go from a vague ambition to something real? Well it included study at City College of San Francisco, and later at University of California at Berkeley. But in between, every night after work I'd go to a three-hour figure drawing class sponsored by San Francisco Adult Education. I probably spent two years doing this (the drawing above is an example that I still have). And in doing so I think really trained my hand and eye to draw the shapes I saw.

Did this directly translate to the shapes of my abstract work or to my ability to draw the shapes of birds now? I really don't know. But I think the most likely answer is that it all came from here.

So there you have it: a short artistic bio. And a theme: from nature, to abstraction, and back to nature again. AND a film debut!

P.S. Speaking of biographies I did want to mention this new one by an author whose River Landing blog I follow. It's a short blog entry about how the author came to find his lifework in the natural sciences. I found it very enjoyable as I have with all of his writings.

Season of Dirty Hands

Yes, this is a bit of a trick title. Based on my last post about gardening and planting seeds you might expect that this post would continue in that line. And if I had all the time in the world it might. But I don't so I worked on this new charcoal drawing today. That leads to very dirty hands. There may still be time to get my hands in potting soil today but only time will tell.

It's been awhile since I've done any charcoal drawings. I think I'm more comfortable with drawing than any other artistic medium. Most of my recent work has been in watercolor. But today I just felt like working without thinking. I'm much more able to do that with drawing than with painting, especially watercolor painting.

This drawing is based on a photo of a Cooper's Hawk in our backyard this winter. It was only when I looked at the photo that I saw he'd caught something. Based on its size I'd guess a pigeon.

For anyone who's interested in my process I normally start off with vine charcoal. In this case I actually did a separate pencil sketch before beginning this charcoal drawing. I then proceed to compressed charcoal when I want finer lines and more shape definition. But compressed charcoal, particularly when you press down on it as hard as I do, doesn't erase well. So the next step is to bring out my array of erasers.

In the end most of my charcoal drawings become somewhat dark. It's very hard to keep any bright white of the paper. But I think in the end there is enough tonal contrast to make the drawings still seem bright.

I'm not sure if I'll do more on this work or not. I need to take a break and return to dirtying my hands in potting soil, nearly frozen soil, and clematis pruning(I know it's late to be doing so...).

A few days later.........Soon after I did this I realized that there was a problem. I'm not going to actually say what it was. But I'm sure it was related to working from a photo rather than from life. When working from life I think that you're much more likely to get gestures, movement, weight distribution, and alignment of various body parts correct. This may just be a matter of really feeling what you are seeing. It's easy to lose this when working with photos and that was the problem here. I've replaced photos so that this shows the new drawing with corrections.

Bird Memories

The memory in the title of this post refers not to how memory works in birds (who would know?) but how an artist needs to use his memory of a bird to draw him or her. The drawing above is not drawn from memory or from life but is informed to some extent by my memory of all the birds I've seen and drawn.

This is my newest charcoal drawing, based on a photo of a Black and White Warbler taken in the trees right outside the Cape May Bird Observatory office in late September, 2008. Cape May has a wealth of good birding spots but sometimes one of the best can be right around the office. Easy birding! Along with many warblers we saw that day here we also saw our first Brown Creeper of the fall.

I continued my live bird sketching this week and it's improving. But there is still a long way to go. One thing that live sketching forces you to do is make quick decisions. Birds, at least feeder birds, have often moved by the time you get pen or pencil to paper. So if you want to be successful, and I say this as someone who's not, I think you need to think as you draw. What should I put down first? The head? What shape is the head? The torso? What shape is it? Where precisely are those dark markings on the throat of a House Sparrow? How does the bill join the forehead? That's the gist of what I learned this week and my sketches have improved a little.

In sketching, if you want to get more than just a sense of movement as in some of the sketches in my last post, you need to recall what a bird looks like, how the bill meets the forehead of a House Sparrow, at the same instant that you are putting pen to paper to catch the bird that's about to move.

It's challenging, sometimes so challenging as to make you want to give up, but also exciting. Will you be able to be a bit more successful this time? This is part of the excitement I mean when I talk about the values of drawing from life.

All well and good you say but why show a drawing based on a photo? Well for one because it's my newest drawing. I'm still not sure if it's done. But also because I drew it after some life sketching yesterday. Though you may well understand the various large feather tracts of birds, e.g. greater coverts, primaries, etc., it's very hard to see them in the brief time in which you see a bird you're trying to sketch. Still that knowledge can help you as you make split second decisions as to what you put down on paper. You look at the bird, review your memory of bird feather structure, think about how you can apply that to this particular sketch, remember what you might have learned in previous sketches and put pen to paper in a second or two or five at most.

As I was working on this drawing I recalled some of what I'd just experienced in sketching House Sparrows, particularly regarding location of feather tracts. The photo is based on just the flat representation of what the camera saw. The photo is just marks on paper; it's not the complicated three-dimensional object itself. The great danger of photos is that they are two-dimensional just like drawings. So in a way the translation is easy. You are going from two dimensions to two dimensions. But a bird, or anything else, is three dimensional. The type of drawing I want to do goes from two dimensions(the photo) to three dimensions(what the photo represents) to two dimensions(the drawing). To do this successfully you really need to understand the structure and volume of the object you're representing. The best way to do that is through the knowledge and memories gained from trying to get down on paper a bird that won't sit still for more than a split second. 'Neural memory', if I recall correctly, is what the Motmot called it. It's part of what makes some drawings seem much more lifelike than others, and I think it's probably also part of what makes drawing from life so rewarding, even with all of its frustrations.

More Shorebird Drawings

I finally got a chance to return to artwork today. As usual the first process is to figure out what medium I'm going to use. The three that I've used exclusively over the last two years are charcoal, pastel and watercolor. Right now I just don't have time to undertake anything new, like for instance printmaking. So today the first hour or two was spent deciding on a medium. I'd almost gotten out my watercolors to try to remedy a very bad watercolor I started a week ago of a robin in our crabapple when I decided that might be like throwing good money after bad. Instead I decided to return to shorebirds and charcoal instead.

I wrote on Museworthy's blog recently that I once spent three hours a night, five days a week doing figure drawing for a couple of years while living in San Francisco. I always did this after working at a very dull job and it helped to bring something creative to my day. Work certainly wasn't! I mentioned that I thought I was still influenced to a great extent by all of that figure drawing. And I think that is one of the appeals of drawing shorebirds. For some reason they seem to take more anthropomorphic poses than other birds, for instance warblers. Or maybe warblers do so but they just don't sit still long enough for you ever to notice. They're constantly on the move.

But shorebirds often amble along, like the Lesser Yellowlegs above, taking a somewhat human pose, and offering the artist a chance to capture that sense of movement. I hope that I have captured the movement here. Now I need to add a little background detail, hopefully without taking all of the life out of the drawing. Only time will tell.........