Wildlife Art Journal

Though the sidebar at right of this page goes on forever some of you may have actually scrolled down it and noticed the link to Wildlife Art Journal.

It was about a year ago that I decided to join and pay a subscription for this online magazine. As the magazine itself says, why pay when everything online is free? Well publishers such as them are making a bet that people will pay for quality content.

It is the same bet that all publishers have had to consider over the last 10 years or so. Will customers pay for content in the face of all that's now free on the web? For awhile many thought that online advertising would pay for the free content. Except that then came the recession and advertising declined, in almost no instances paying for the cost of providing content.

I won't go on about this, though 25 years in the newspaper industry did get me to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it. With Wildlife Art Journal I decided that I wanted to place my bet on people being willing to pay for quality content. Personally I believe that there is no other business model that will work. Quality content takes time and money to produce. Somebody has to pay for it. Or we'll just have low quality free content. Worse we might forget what quality content even was.

All well and good you might say but why write about this now? Well the main reason is to note that the pastel at top is in the Gallery of the Commons in the new issue. It's the second time I've had something shown there. So I just wanted to mention that. If you click on the link above you can close the pop-up box asking if you want to subscribe. Many of the articles are free, including Gallery of the Commons. There you'll find a collection of 57 photos of 'wildlife art', some good, some not.

I realize that there are probably few readers of this blog who are interested in wildlife art. So you may want to stop reading right here if you have no interest.

The thing is I myself didn't even know if I was interested in wildlife art when I subscribed. My educational background is 'Fine Art.' I have Bachelors of Fine Art and a Masters of Fine Art. Once I decided to start working with natural subjects, birds in particular, I realized that I was abandoning, and would soon be abandoned by, Fine Art. The two just don't overlap, neither in the 20th nor the 21st century.

When I started using birds as subjects four years ago I didn't even like wildlife art. Almost everything I saw seemed cliched, kitchsy, formulaic, anything but vital even though it had 'life' in its very name. But over the last four years I found that there were some wildlife artists who I really liked and respected. And what convinced me to subscribe to Wildlife Art Journal was that it seemed to be raising the same questions about wildlife art that I had.

And that's really why I'm writing this long, somewhat rambling post. The newest issue seems particularly vibrant, raising all the right questions about art, nature, wildlife, the environment and their connection. And it's far more than that. A recent blog entry there had an essay on Laurie David's 'The Family Dinner', about the importance of a family getting together around dinner. I don't find that a far cry from a concern for nature and for a love of art that cares about nature.

I really found the new issue to be somewhat like a Christmas present, and an unexpected one at that. If you have any interest in nature, art, wildlife or conservation I'd encourage you to pay a visit.

And that annoying popup box that follows you around the site is offering a special subscription fee of only $8 for the next year. It's well worth it, and about twice what I paid!

Tossing the Paisley Bell-bottoms

Two posts back I mentioned that I was undecided about the state of my new pastel of a Hermit Thrush and Sandhill Cranes. Something made me want to leave a number of areas of white. I wasn't making any sort of statement. It just looked good to me, just as some paisley bell-bottoms did to me, and not just me alone, many, many years ago. But finally I decided that it was more important to put some color in those areas than to leave them white. I ditched the bell-bottoms.

I think that the version above is the last. It seemed more important to me to try to unite the entire drawing by color than to leave the bright white of the paper. I particularly thought I needed more darks toward the bottom and sides and so that white tree trunk on the left became brown-orange.

This drawing is an accomplishment for me in that this scene never existed. It's a composite of two views I saw at Horicon Marsh last fall. The two scenes are only separated by a few hundred yards and a 90 degree change of direction so such a scene could have happened. But it didn't. Not until my imagination came along. I don't think I ever would have tried this in watercolor. But the loose way in which I use charcoal and pastel made it much easier to do.

Among the many skills an artist needs is the ability to alter reality, even if only slightly. Not all artists do this and for all my hankering for expressiveness I've never been one of them. But I felt that I was limiting myself. That's why this seems like a personal accomplishment. It opens up a lot of possibilities for future paintings.



I made far fewer changes to the Osprey drawing. Almost all of them are in the sky. I hope that I've made it interesting enough, through color and texture, to create an interesting interplay with the silhouette of the birds, nest and tree.

NEW BLOG

After my last posting on Devil's Walkingstick I decided that I really wanted to be able to keep track of what birds I, and others, saw feeding on their berries this fall. If you're interested or would like to add your own observations please visit Feeding on Devil's Walkingstick.

Finding the Correct Tool

The drawing above is based on a photo I took at Thompson's Beach in southern New Jersey last May. I really liked the photo, both the birds and the color of the water. The blue of the water really set off the black and white of the Black-bellied Plovers. But the one or two watercolor sketches I did of it previously only hinted at what I saw.

Since I've decided to work in pastel and charcoal for a bit I was looking for subject matter. When I saw this photo I just had to try another version.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm now in abstract mode or just that the way I use pastel I never have to worry about details, probably the latter. In any case I soon found that this was just the medium to get across what I saw that day, both the beauty of the plovers, in shape, pose and color, and the striking beauty of the water, two different shades of blue. This was rounded off with the rusty color of the Short-billed Dowitchers.

I'm not sure if this is done. Sometimes I just like to post them so I can get another perspective on them. Most likely it is done. I'd like to keep it fresh. Either way at least to me it shows that sometimes you just have to stumble upon the right tool for the job. The scene seemed to lend itself to the broader and bolder method of treatment that both pastel and abstraction allow.

And yet realism is in here. I never would have felt free to do these generalized dowitchers and plovers if I hadn't done many more realistic paintings and drawings of both.

Heron Suite

As you may have guessed I've really been taken with the Green Heron we saw at Tinicum last year. Here they're not all that uncommon but the markings on this particular immature bird, coupled with the surrounding environment, made him seem special and kept calling me back for another portrayal.

I've done four new watercolors, two I've aleady shown, one is too bad to show, and the other is below. While showing them at birdforum Tim Wootton, one of the inspirational artists there, suggested that it looked like an abstraction was dying to break loose.

Abstract/non-onbjective art is my true background. I've only worked naturalistically for the last four years. So the work at top is the Green Heron redone abstractly.

I could go on theorizing forever about the motivations for abstract or non-objective art. And I'm sure I wouldn't come up with any definitive answer. But for me at least part of the appeal is artistic expression. I've always likened this to music, especially music without lyrics. No one doubts its power and yet their is no story connected with it. You enjoy the music itself, the melody, rhythm, orchestration, etc. It has a real emotional power. The same can be said for the elements of art, color, shape, brushwork, pattern, etc.

The great difficulty I think with it is that it can lose any connection to the natural world and become somewhat febrile, too much of a greenhouse flower. So to me it needs to constantly be fed by observation of the natural world. At one time I considered this heresy. This was a limitation on art, and an archaic one at that. Not something anyone in 20th, or 21st, century should be bound by. But I haven't thought that for a long while. Nature is nature, regardless of century, and it's always one of the most important sources of art.

All that said you'll have to make what you will of the pastel at top. I'm happy with it and will probably do some more abstract works. I do have to say that I wouldn't have felt so comfortable taking liberties with the heron and turtles if I hadn't just finished so many recent realistic versions.




The painting above was the last watercolor. It's also the largest, at 12x16 inches. Oddly I also like it. There are times when the background just seems too empty. But most of the time it just looks tranquil, as it was.

So perhaps this ends the suite of Green Heron paintings and drawings. It's been fun and I think that between them all I've captured some sense of what it was like seeing this one on that day.

In Between

I confess that this is a somewhat self-serving post. I'm putting up this version of the Palm Warbler drawing so that I can see it online. I could also do so by just looking at it on the computer. But I prefer to put it on the blog, along with some explanation. Some artists look at their painting in a mirror. I used to sneak up on mine. I'd go away and come back in the room and see how it hit me just as I peaked in the door.

You might think this seems silly or unbelievable. But I think it's safe to say many artists don't really know what they're doing. They have to do it, sneak up on it, and then see if it gives them a clue as to how to proceed. Authors talk about their characters taking over the plot and determining where it will go. The same is true in art. So putting this online may give me a clue as to what to do next.

I have always been struck by the brilliant white of the limestone on Dike Road at Horicon Marsh, especially in conjunction with the background reeds. The new reeds are green and maroon with bits of yellow and orange. The old dead reeds are a pale ochre. But then as you look back into them you see the richest dark. It would make Velazquez, Goya and Manet jealous.

Add to this scene one elegant Palm Warbler and you can see, I hope, why I chose to draw it. But there are extreme color contrasts: the cool white of the rocks, the deep rich reds, oranges, greens and black of the reeds. And then the sublty colored dun-browns of the warbler. How you put them all together in one painting?

Well that was the challenge here and I haven't solved it. I thought adding some color to the limestone might help. But if it has it's surely not enough to do the trick. Past experience tells me the answer will be simplification. It often is in art. You go back and forth, round and round, and finally you simplify. We shall see.

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Monday morning - added the newest version at top. Still deciding on whether it needs more work.

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Wednesday afternoon. Yep it is done! I didn't really see the need for a separate post for this. But in case you were waiting, on pins and needles, to see if I was going to change it the answer is no.

This is a more ambitious drawing than many of mine. But it may seem like a less successful drawing. The warbler is secondary at best. But that is fine with me. Birds exist in a world, not in isolation. I'm not a big fan of bird portraits. I prefer them in their environment. And though I've never been a great fan of Robert Bateman I am impressed by his desire to show the environment in which his subjects live. (And of course I'm impressed by his devotion to saving the environment from the many thousands of people who are all to happy to destroy it and everything in it.To me birds aren't trophies to be put up on pedestals. They're real creatures in a real world. And this is a real scene, the only modification being the addition of the wild lettuce. It did show up in other photos I took of same scene so it was nearby.

My guess it that this may not be my most popular art. But I do think it is one of my best works of the last year.

Don't Fiddle Now!

It may be a little too early for Fiddlehead Ferns. But it's never time to fiddle with your artwork. It's always been true for me, and I'd guess for most people, that finishing a painting or drawing is always the hardest part. Rather than face the problems head on, assuming that you can even see what they are, artists of all sorts tend to fiddle. Put a little dab there, a little dab here, oh I messed that up better just erase what I just did, oops now look what I've done I've really messed this up, etc., etc. The other problem is stopping too quickly, never pushing yourself to be a bit more ambitious.

In any case all of those thoughts came into play with this pastel. I've spent a fair amount of time on it this morning but fear doing anything more. I think it's improved and has that sense of a bright beautiful bird on a bright beautiful morning, up in the trees, just like he always is.

Great-crested Pastel

I haven't had any time to do any artwork over the last week. But I did have an interesting week reading the first two books published on artist Robert Bateman. I've never looked at him closely, but what I have seen I haven't liked much. I know that this is probably considered sacrilege in wildlife art circles.

But I have to say that I'm glad I read the two books. I have a new appreciation for him. That appreciation had begun with an essay by him on the Wildlife Art Journal (the site is a pay site but some samples are available for free). The essay is called, as I recall, something like 'Why I Am a 21st-century Conservative.' I found myself thoroughly in agreement with him in terms of how neo-conservatives have absolutely corrupted the notion of 'conservation', natural, social and cultural. I was so impressed by it that I wanted to give him another look.

It has been a pleasure. For one thing the reproductions are richer than those I'd seen elsewhere. In particular the color is much richer. And the design stands out more. Also Bateman talks about how he's not happy when people praise his skill in portraying detail. That's not really all that important to him. This was a surprise because if I'd had to sum up his work previous to reading these books I would have said: too much detail, rendered in too-muted colors. So it was a pleasant surprise to see that though he does care about detail that is only part of his motivation.

I don't want to go on anymore about him here. Perhaps in another post. In any case seeing how important design was to him reminded me of my Great-crested Flycatcher still on the back burner, waiting for a more developed rendering than my last quick watercolor.

I've had these photos for a couple of years and just couldn't figure out how to do a painting or drawing based on them. Today I did a few more design experiments in color and then finally went with something fairly similar to what I used a couple of weeks ago. It is amazing to me how much time I spent on trying to figure out a design that I liked. This was the only one that showed promise.

There is definitely more work to do here. But it's off to a solid start. I suppose I could still ruin it. But since I haven't posted anything in awhile I wanted to post it, half-done though it is.

Magic Geese

In all my work drawing geese and ducks at Valley Green over the last few weeks I always thought I really ought to do some more finished work using them as subjects. I'm not yet good enough with field sketching to base a finished work on it. So my last day there I took some photos.

You see the result in this pastel.

I have an almost pathological aversion to losing all the white in a drawing or a watercolor(even if I eventually do!). So I'm leaving this as is for now. I'm very happy with it. I just can't tell if it will survive with so much undeveloped white paper.

But I do have sense enough, finally, to leave it sit for now and not go back into it. I'd love to leave is as is. But I need to take a break and see if that will work or is just wishful thinking on my part.

The title of this post, 'Magic Geese', by the way refers to their beauty. Many people just think of Canada Geese as pests. And I can understand that view when 100s of them congregate on your lawn, leaving their little presents. But when you sit down and try to draw them you can't help but see how beautiful they are, in structure, value and color.

Freedom to Make Mistakes

A funny thing happened as I worked on this drawing, now in its third or fourth day I think. I realized that I was spending a lot of time trying to retrieve what I'd lost from the last version of this drawing that I posted.

I won't rattle on forever about that but it does seem appropriate for this my 100th post. When I started this blog, originally a web site, I thought I'd use it to write down bird sightings, thoughts on birds, nature and art, and maybe throw in a quick sketch or two. But as time went on I realized that my strongest interest by far was in developing my art and showing it here.

When I started this drawing I wanted to be somewhat improvisatory, as I've been through most of my artistic career. I had foregone improvisation to a large extent over the last three years as I took up birds as my subject. But something gnawed at me as I did so. I wanted to be true to the birds I saw but I wanted more artistic freedom.

I think I've finally gotten to the stage where I'm regaining that freedom. And one of the big parts of that freedom is the Freedom to Make Mistakes!

I think that may be what happened when I went back into this drawing to try to unify the background, so that it seemed more illusionistic and not so much just painterly markings with pastel. In doing that I think I lost some of the summery brightness that the drawing had on Sunday.

I hope that I've retrieved some of that. If not I think I have at least turned it into a finished drawing. And that is really what is important to me.

When I did abstract and non-objective work most drawings took days to finish. If they didn't then they at least took a full eight hour day. I was never satisified with what I did, at least not immediately. But generally after those days of work I was satisfied. I felt that I had a finished drawing. Paintings were the same but took weeks rather than days.

Most of my bird art has been done in much less time. Anyone who follows this blog knows that occasionally I still spend too long because I have ruined a good quick watercolor or two by overwork. That's undoubtedly true. But I think watercolor is a different type of medium. Most artists need to work quickly when using it. It just won't get better with continued work.

Pastels, charcoals and paintings are different however. It is possible to make them better with more work. It doesn't always work out, but even when it doesn't you generally learn something.

So that is really why this works seems appropriate for my 100th post. Whether it's better or worse than my drawing from Sunday I can't say right now. I'm too close to it. What's most important though is that I worked on it until I thought it was finished, really finished, like my old abstract works. Sometimes this is a painful process. But I think in the end it makes for better stronger work. And for happier artists!

Finished(?) Acadian Flycatcher in Pastel

This improvisatory drawing of an Acadian Flycatcher may be finished. It is certainly finished for an hour or two. My tendency as an artist is to just launch into activity and see what happens. I like working that way and probably can't work any other way. But sometimes it gets me into trouble! A little more thought and patience might be useful.

So over the ywars I've learned that even though I may work in a fevered flurry it's best to take a break before I destroy something good because I'm working too quickly. So for now this sits.

It's not quite as bright as yesterday's drawing but I think it looks a bit more realistic. Anyway I'm sure I'll have a better opinion on it after letting it sit for a bit.

Improvisation in Greens

Today just didn't work out for any fieldsketching so I decided to grab an hour or two of studio work. It seemed like a good time to return to pastel and charcoal work, with the subject as usual based on a photo I'd taken.

I'd been happy with my recent Piping Plovers in charcoal and pastels so that's one reason I chose this medium. I also had been happy with the recent watercolor of the Acadian Flycatcher surrounded by leaves and catkins, probably birch, and basking in a golden/green glow. There is something about that glow I love. So I decided to do a drawing based on another photo of the flycatcher.

But as I started I realized that there was something else. I wanted to improvise, as I used to in my abstract and non-objective drawings and paintings. So that's what I did. There is a basic drawing here and a wee bit of planning. But most of this is an improvisation. Who knows how it will turn out?



The drawing at the top is the first version, mainly in compressed charcoal with some pastel. The version above adds much more pastel and a fair amount of erasure. As with so much of my work I need to take care that I don't lose too much of the brilliant white of the paper. It will be another tightrope walk. So will the rest of the work. I really don't know where I'm going with this. But that is the thrill of improvisation. Sometimes it works; and sometimes it doesn't.

When I was a graduate student in art at Cornell I loved jazz and really thought of much of my work as being similar to improvisatory jazz. There may be a foundational melody or other structure to come back to but the fun is in experimenting away from that structure. In this case it's the Acadian Flycatcher and foliage. I hope that I won't lose the structure in my improvisation. As with all my bird art I still want to stay true to the subject.

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.

Acadian Flycatcher in Pastel - Surprise Shapes

I think that this drawing is done. I've let it sit for a week while I looked at it. I made some minor changes, the main one being the addition of darker gray/browns to the upper part of the drawing so that it wouldn't be misread as sky.

As I've looked at it I realized that it isn't as much about color as I'd thought. Like most of my work, abstract or realistic, shape is very important. I'm not sure why I didn't realize that about this drawing. Now that it's done I see how much the tree limbs stand out. Perhaps because they are fairly realistic, and not based too much on my imagination, I just didn't think about them playing an important part in the 'art' of the drawing that I mentioned in an earlier post. But they do.

MY Artistic Convention(s)

As I've looked at my other work over the last week I realize that most of it involves a love of drawing, especially drawing in the sense of carving an object out of the flat dimension of paper or canvas. Sometimes those shapes are realistic, and strive to capture the contours of what I see. At other times they are abstract and more concerned with carving a new object from nothing. In both cases they generally show some of the process involved.

Showing the process involved in a work of art is a 20th century art convention. In the eyes of some most conventions eventually seem to be cliches. The most noticeable example of this I think is the gratuitous painterly drip. Nonetheless it is MY convention. I don't feel right hiding all aspects of the act of illusion creation that is the basis of most representational art. So if someone might wonder why I might not do smoother, more finished drawings, especially as I create the shapes, this is why. I just don't like too much smoothness and the hiding of the process of creating the illusion. For me there is some work involved in getting shapes right. I like to let some of that work show. I realize this is a convention. It does not in itself create better art. But it's my convention.

Acadian Flycatcher in Pastel - No Details

I enjoyed switching from watercolor to pastel in my last drawing and decided to try it again today. Much more than watercolor it is an additive process, i.e. I can start out without a clear plan of what I'm going to do, knowing that I can improvise as I go along. I don't need to worry as much about using up something, e.g. the white of the paper, and then needing to get it back later. Though it's possible to use the clear white of the paper thoughtlessly, just as in watercolor, it is easier to get it back to some degree through the use of white pastel. Since pastel is itself opaque, the addition of another layer of opaque white is not as noticeable as it is in watercolor. Or better, it doesn't seem as bothersome.

This drawing is based on photos of an Acadian Flycatcher taken in Shenandoah National Park in May, 2008. The bird is even more distant than were the Wood Ducks in my last drawing and posting. Because of that I knew that any work based on it was going to have to devote a lot of space to the surrounding forest, with very little devoted to the flycatcher itself.

I didn't do much in the way of a preliminary drawing. If I had done so it would have focused on the tree limbs and foliage and not on the flycatcher, since he is so small. At the same time I had to do something with him so that he was the focus of the painting. This might have been somewhat easier in watercolor and pen/pencil since I could use the line of the pen or pencil to add some small detail. But detail with the broad edge of a pastel is not so easy. Basically pastel doesn't allow detail.

So my idea here was to start laying in color, knowing that there would probably be numerous changes as I tried to unify the drawing coloristically, remain true to some extent to the sense of the deep forest that is often the home of the Acadian Flycatcher, and make sure that he still stood out from the surrounding jungle of limbs and leaves.

The drawing so far has some sense of the deep forest, but the Flycatcher is a bit lost. And the upper part of the drawing reads like it might be sky when in fact it is just a deeper part of the forest. I may need to change the colors to remedy that. Still I think I've kept some of the sense of the way in which he sat and tilted his head. The colors may also have gotten a bit too monotonous, though that in fact is what they actually were. It's time to leave it be for now and come back another day.

So What Is this 'Art'?

In my last post I mentioned rescuing a drawing/painting that didn't include significant, realistic detail with 'art.' This was said half facetiously and half seriously. It could sound like I was saying that a work without significant detail was somehow lacking and needed 'art' to make it as presentable as a more detailed work. Many people think this, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people who like 'wildlife art' think in this way.

That was the partially facetious part of what I said. I think it's more important to think of realistic detail and 'art' as different, though not mutually exclusive, goals in art. Though there is some satisfaction for me in portraying great detail, as in the Robber Fly drawing in the last post, it is often not as strong as creating something that matches my notion of 'art.'

The three variations on a pastel and charcoal drawing of a wood duck and ducklings in this post are an example of what I'm talkng about. They are based on photos I took at Tinicum(John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Philadelphia) on Memorial Day weekend, 2008. In most the ducks were a fair distance away. When I began this work it would have been difficult, but not impossible, to show much detail because the photos didn't. If I had a more developed visual memory of wood ducks in particular or just birds in general I might have been able to do so but I don't. So why bother to use them as subjects? Because it was a striking and memorable scene and something that I wanted to express on paper. AND it seemed to present an opportunity to create something 'artful.'



So 'art' is something 'artful'? Perfectly clear. Well I suppose not. Let me just say that I thought that I could do something with this subject that would end up both giving some sense of what the scene was like as I saw it and allowing me to use color, gesture and shape in such a way that I was pleased with the overall visual impression.

It began as a strictly charcoal drawing. It is possible to use tonal variety in black and white drawings to create something just as colorful as a work in color. But I didn't feel that was happening so I decided to add pastel on top of the black charcoal. This was my first use of pastel in a realistic work in many, many years. As the work developed, and reading from top to bottom here, I added some color here, removed some there, erased more here, etc. The intent was both to create something whose colors worked together to create something vibrant and to remain true, at least to a large extent, to what I had originally seen. In particular I wanted to preserve the sense of a Wood Duck and ducklings in water.

As I worked on it, it was the rearrangement of color, more than anything that I kept changing. That was the driving force in continuing to work on it. And in this case I think it was the most important aspect of the 'art.' In other drawings it may be shape, or mark, or design, or numerous other things. All of them make up 'art', and for me they are the most important part of drawing and painting. The difference in my nsturalistic art is that I also want to remain true, to some large degree, to what I originally saw.

A Bird in the Hand.............Is Drawn Differently

Following up on my last post on precision in art I realized afterwards that one reason I've been able to do more precise work with insects is that I've caught the insects and then drawn them under a dissecting microscope. The detail I can see is strong AND the insect doesn't move. It is dead.

I don't know any bird artists personally. The ones I've read about sometimes work from study skins in museums, or dead birds that they may have happened upon. In that case the bird is also dead and allows more detailed study, though of course it is no longer alive. Still it does allow a more detached scientific study similar to that of an insect under a microscope. My understanding is that this was Audubon's primary method of work, after he'd shot the bird. It is probably the best way to see some details that can only be seen in brief glimpses in the field.

On the other hand some bird artists whose work I very much admire work primarily from life, i.e. they only draw and paint what they actually see. They don't use photos. This reminds me of the times I used to draw mayflies. Mayflies live only for a day or so. Moreover everytime I used to catch them they would shrivel up into pale husks of their former beautiful selves. Their beauty was evident only when they were alive. You either had to draw them as they flitted about while alive or draw a shrunken corpse that seemed to have little relation to the live mayfly. Without getting too philosophical about this I do think that it is an apt analogy.

More detail can be seen/drawn/painted when a bird or insect is no longer alive and not being such a nuisance moving about at unexpected times. On the other hand the artist always knows the insect or bird might move and he needs to be extra alert to capture what he sees as he sees it. A second later the bird may have moved. I think that this relates to why I prefer works done from life.

The drawing at top is a portion of a larger drawing. It shows a Robber Fly drawn while viewed under a microscope. The watercolor is based on a photo taken of a Warbling Vireo at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge(Tinicum) in Philadelphia on Memorial Day weekend, 2008. As I mentioned last time I'm always more interested in creating a work of art when using birds as subjects than I am when drawing insects. That may be related to the fact that I can never see them with the same detail that I see insects. On the other hand it may also be that the lack of precision tells me that the drawing/painting lacks something. Maybe I can rescue it with 'art'.