Spring Flight

Common Green Darners, Tree Swallow, Pied-billed Grebe and Canada Goose on Nest. Pencil and Crayon Sketch by Ken Januski.

One of the great thrills of spring is the exuberant flight, or at least it looks exuberant to me, of birds and insects. Tree Swallows are always among the most impressive and such a welcome change from the slow pace of winter. Yesterday they were joined by the first dragonflies of the year, Common Green Darners, as well as soaring Red-tailed Hawks. I couldn't find a place for the hawks here but I did manage to combine the Tree Swallows and Common Green Darner. Typical of this time as well, particularly in the wetlands of Morris Arboretum, are nesting Canada Geese. Much rarer and in fact yesterday was the first time we've seen them there were Pied-billed Grebes, in migration I'm sure.

I think because this is such an exciting time I'd like to use a medium that matches the excitement and exuberance. Over the years I've found that pencil and water soluble crayons, which are capable of also being used as a wash, work very well. As in the last post this is done with Caran d'Ache Neocolor II crayons..

Next to Last Color on the Mergansers and Grebes

Mergansers and Grebes on Schuylkill River. Third State of Multi-block Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

After deliberating about the second color for the water in this print I went ahead and printed it this morning. Yesterday I had a deeper blue green but I decided that something more olive/yellow might work better. We shall see.

It's so hard to actually evaluate a print at this stage. I know that the final(hopefully) black color will bring back a lot of contrast. I hope it will both accentuate the birds, separating them a bit from the background, and add sparkle to the tonal sense of the print.

As Winslow Homer and many others have said, it is tone that underlies everything. I hated those gray scale charts in beginning art class and they really seemed worthless at the time. I'm not sure if you ever really learn anything from doing them. But I think at some point most artists realize that tone is their friend.

One of the things that turns me from so much illustration, including wildlife illustration, is that it often has no tonal contrast. There's just a variety of  lukewarm grays. As I said tone is your friend.

As usual when I print I realize how easy it is to get lost in technique. I never pursued printmaking in my lengthy college education, perhaps because it seemed to rely too much on technique. But the more I print the more I realize that technique too is your friend, though it may take many years to master or even vaguely control it.

Regaining, Temporarily, Some Black and White Contrast

Mergansers and Grebes on the Schuylkill River. Proof state of Multi-block Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Way back in the beginning when I started this there was a fair amount of black and white contrast. That was partially because I was using black ink on a more or less white paper. But it also was because three of the four subjects had a large amount of black and white contrast in themselves.

Most noticeable is the male Common Merganser, a study in black and white if there ever was one. Less strong but still there is the upper head of the Red-necked Grebe in contrast with the white of parts of the neck.  And stretching it just a wee bit is the dark gray/brown/black of the Pied-billed Grebe contrasting with the white of the bill and eye ring.

That contrast disappeared once I printed the gray blue color yesterday. I still have one more color, for the rest of the water, to print before I print the black on top of everything. But I'd like to get a hint as to what the black will look like before I print the second color of the water.

So this is a proof of the black block on some proofs of the print as of yesterday. As I ponder it I'll make a decision about what color to choose for the remaining water. The print will never ever look just like this in its final state. But it will help me decide on the final state. Once the black of the water is replaced by a new color, possibly an olive green, the black and white contrast of the birds should stand out more strongly. And of course I'll need to do a bit of cutting away of the black on the female Common Merganser so show her handsome chestnut head and neck.

To repeat myself from yesterday I still like the way this is going. And now it hardly even looks experimental, at least to my unbiased eye.

Stravinsky - A Rite of Spring

Mergansers and Grebes in the Schuylkill River. Second State of Multi-block Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Well I missed it! I was too busy out seeing what new birds might have arrived and sketching an American Wigeon that is lingering and then too busy working on the second state of the mergansers and grebes woodcut to listen to Stravinksy's Rite of Spring.

Each year for the past few years WRTI, our local classical and jazz radio station has played it on the first day of spring. I assume that they did so again today. I mention it because each time I hear it I'm reminded of how exciting it is, and yet how old it also is, 101 years to be exact.

I have the same reaction each time I hear it: how can anyone be doing traditional art in the light of music as revolutionary as this?! I know we can't, and shouldn't, all be revolutionaries. But each time I hear it I am forced to question the type of art that I do.

So given the experimental nature of my new print it seemed quite fitting to mention Stravinsky. Though it certainly wasn't planned or intentional this print does to some extent try to answer the question of how to make art, especially wildlife art, in the light of over 100 years of modern art, in the visual arts, music, literature etc.

I planned out what I intended to do today, cut out a little more from the second wood block, and then printed it. I really had no idea what the print would look like when I lifted it up off of the block. No idea at all and only the vaguest notion that I thought it might be exciting.

Well I'm pleased. I did some more cutting and proofing and then finally printed this second color on the good paper. For the first time I'm trying Torinoko paper. So far it's worked fine.

As usual I always discover a few technical problems when I print. I think that's largely because I'm not a full time printmaker. I'm not devoted just to it so I often forget things that I learned about technique. But I'm improving. One thing I've noticed is that I prefer a washier ink when using woodblock. That lets the grain of the wood show a bit more. It ends up giving the image an overall softer quality and that seems fine.

I plan on at least two more colors here: a second color for the water on the block I printed today, and then black on the first block. I'm hoping it will tie everything together. If not I may have to go back into the third block, the one I printed first with the colored geometric shapes. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For now I can just say that I'm happy with the way that this is going.

Mergansers and Grebes - Day Two, Block Two

Mergansers and Grebe on Schuylkill River. State Three of Multi-block Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

It may not look like it but there are two separate woodblocks used on this print, well actually both sides of one woodblock, which is effectively two woodblocks. The colors at the moment are too close to one another, black and slate blue/gray. Now that I see what it looks like I know that I'll need to lighten up the slate blue/gray.

I want at least two colors in the water. One, a new lighter gray, will also serve as part of the plumage of both grebes. As I determine how these two blocks interact I'll change each of them. At the moment I've printed the black of the first woodblock on top of the slate blue/gray of the second block. But I need to cut away more of the black so that more of the new improved gray will eventually show through.

There is still the red of the female Common Merganser head and the yellow of the Red-necked Grebe bill to contend with. And most likely I'll try to break the picture plane by adding a second color in the water that makes a zigzag from back to front out towards the viewer. That is my intent. If it works as planned it will take away much possibility of this being read as realistic. That at least is my goal.

As I said in the last post I would like this to look like the 20th and 21st century have actually taken place, at least part of the 21st century, and that I'm not completely blind to them. In a way I hate to do this because it takes liberties with the birds and with realistic space among other things. But sometimes you just have to try something new.

Stuart Davis was an old hero of mine when I was an abstract painter and I always envisioned myself doing something similar to him when I turned from abstraction to birds. But I think that if I were to try something similar I'd feel that the resulting print too drastically flattened space and veered a little too close to decoration. So I'm going to try to avoid it and see if I can get some kind of compromise. Time will tell.

Mergansers and Grebes Woodcut - The Beginning

Mergansers and Grebes on Schuylkill River. Stage Two of Woodcut by Ken Januski.

I know that this print is a far cry from my last watercolor sketch. But it won't stay like this. I'm putting it up more to show a print in a very raw state, and to convince myself I hope to keep some of the rawness. This is the second state of the print, replacing the pockmarked first state that I put up yesterday.

I'm really much too old to be a bad boy when it comes to art. But often as I look through reproductions of wildlife art there's something in me that wants to scream, that makes me want to become a bad boy.

I can appreciate more realistic art work, and when it seems honest I can like it very much. But if it doesn't feel true, if it feels formulaic or sentimental my hackles go up. I want to do very raw wildlife art as an antidote. I also know that at heart I 'm just not the type of person who should do particularly realistic art. It may please me a bit, perhaps please others even more. But it will never be really exciting to me. For excitement and fulfillment, at least in my own work, there has to be something else.

So we'll see where this leads. I often find that I can think art to death. This results in procrastination. It's hard to know if all the thinking eventually adds to future work. Perhaps when this print is done I'll have a better idea. In the meantime I decided it was time to stop thinking and instead start working.

One recent thought upon looking at some catalogs from shows of wildlife art was that so much of it looked like it was from the 19th century. That's not inherently bad. Great art has been done in many styles. Perhaps someone really loves 19th century art and nothing since then. It's quite easy to throw your hands up in the face of contemporary art. But isn't it possible for some wildlife art, and I know that there is some, to look like it's familiar with both the 20th and 21st century?  I can't claim to represent this type of art but it is something I've been thinking about and it may help decide where this print goes.

Pictured are Common Mergansers, both male and female, and two grebes, a Red-necked and a Pied-billed. I saw all over the last month in the nearby Schuylkill River.

90 Minutes at the Schuylkill, or Risky Composition

Common Merganser, Pied-billed Grebe and Bufflehead on the Schuylkill River, Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski

The explosion of Red-necked Grebes and other unusual waterfowl continues throughout Pennsylvania. I wondered in the last post if we were seeing more because we'd become better birders or more likely because of the cold and snowy winter. Soon after I posted this I realized that it was probably neither, though it was related to the latter. It's not so much snow, as ice. Many traditional waters are frozen. I've continued to read about this, though more in regard to gulls than waterfowl, on the PA Birds listserv. Just yesterday someone mentioned seeing a sight they never thought they'd see: Red-breasted Mergansers being fed bread along with the more typical geese and mallards. The birds we so much enjoy seeing are visible because they're famished.

In any case we couldn't resist a quick drive across the Green Lane Bridge to the other side of  the Schuylkill River today hoping to see something unusual. It was about 20 degrees cooler than Saturday though so we limited the time of our visit. In many ways it seems silly to drive a greater distance just to see the other side of our nearby river, the Schuylkill. More than anything else it's a matter of comfort and vantage point. On this side, at least close by, there is nowhere to park, nowhere to sit, and not much of a clear view. You have to walk, which is generally what we do. But it's always a question as to whether it's worth it to carry a scope and tripod a long distance just on the possibility that we'll see something in the river once we have a decent view. This changes once you cross the bridge. You park and then set up your scope, the river right in front of you.

Oddly enough we saw a grebe that we should have seen a long time ago, a Pied-billed Grebe. That is the grebe we expect to see during winter. So it was shock to find a Red-necked in 2014 before seeing a Pied-billed Grebe.

We also saw numerous Common Mergansers and two Bufflehead. Though we'd seen a number of female Bufflehead for the Philadelphia Mid-winter Bird Census in early January this was our first male of the year.

It was too cold to try sketches and my time was limited. Instead I took one photo of the buffleheads. The watercolor sketch above is based on it and other photos I've taken. Since I wanted to get four birds in I changed to a slightly larger, 7x10 inch Stillman and Birn Gamma sketchbook.

I normally wouldn't put a second title in this post's title, as though I'd reverted back to the type of title used in the very first British novels from centuries ago. But I wanted to emphasize that this is a painting that is about composition more than anything. I wanted to do more than just a portrait of one bird.

But how to you get more than one bird on a piece of paper or canvas without everything looking staged? None of the scene above actually happened, outside of the close proximity of the Common Merganser and Pied-billed Grebe. This is an attempt to put all four birds together in a way that both seems believable and is artistically exciting. I think that I've succeeded. (Please don't tell me otherwise...........). Artists reading this will probably ask why I bother to point out the obvious. My reason, rightly or wrongly, is for those who enjoy seeing art based on nature, but just don't understand anything other than straightforward portraiture. For me it is the excitement of coming up with compositions, with finding ways to make the old new, that makes art worth doing. If all I wanted was a photographic representation I'm not sure I'd continue to find art rewarding.

GBBC Day One - Mergansers and Grebes

Great Backyard Bird Count 2013 - Day One. Pied-billed Grebes, Common Mergansers and Black Vulture at Manayunk Canal. Watercolor by Ken Januski

We started the Great Backyard Bird Count for 2013 by birding Manayunk Canal and a small stretch of the Schuylkill River which joins it. The watercolor above is a composite of birds seen today, drawn and painted primarily from memory. I did do one field sketch of an oddly posed Great Blue Heron but it's not good enough to show.

So instead I thought it made sense to do a quick watercolor from memory. We saw the Common Mergansers and Pied-billed Grebes together though not quite as close together as this indicates. They were in the Schuylkill River near where it joins the Manayunk Canal. It was also nice to see one Black Vulture so I've added him behind them, though in actuality I never saw him on that side of the river. Artistic liberty!

I don't see Common Mergansers all that often and never quite as close as this indicates. Pied-billed Grebes I see more often than the merganser, and closer, but still not all that often. So I first did this strictly from memory then looked at my photos and other references to fine tune them. This is a very rough sketch with very little detail. But its purpose is not to serve as a field guide, nor as great art. Just a reminder of an enjoyable day out birding in winter.

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.