Cicadas and Field Sketching

I've continued to do field sketches since I last posted, both at Valley Green, where ducks and geese are plentiful, and at Morris Arboretum, where I and my wife went this weekend. The most notable thing at Morris however was not the birds but the insects, specifically cicadas.

I'm not sure we've ever seen such an abundance of them. And I'm not sure the local birds had either. We had barely started birding when we saw a number of birds flycatching. Flycatchers, right? No, Warbling Vireos. More than that they looked like flycatchers who suddenly decided to make right turns in the middle of a dive. I'm not sure but I think they were going after the cicadas.

I thought about trying to take a photo of some of the closeup cicadas but it just didn't seem worth the effort to unpack the camera from the daypack. By the time I did the insects probably would have flown! They normally do, whether they're birds or insects. Possibly I should have tried a sketch.

We did manage to see a number of birds at Morris as well. The most interesting for sketching purposes were two Green Herons and one pale, probably immature Northern Flicker. I include a page with sketches of both. The heron has three legs because he shifted his pose while I was drawing him.

Two trips to Valley Green produced a couple of pages of ducks and geese. Interestingly the one hybrid goose, with knob on head and wattle on neck, is a Chinese Goose, not a Graylag/Barnyard Goose as I'd guessed. They're both domesticated geese and so aren't as usual in guidebooks. That coupled with all the hybrid ducks at Valley Green makes me want to write them all off as hybrids. But a passerby told me he thought the geese were Chinese Geese and he was right. They're actually very handsome.



The Valley Green page above includes a duck I've shown previously. But the other birds on that page are new. I'm showing it particularly because of the Mallard with one leg raised in lower right. He wasn't just drying it off, or instigating a new dance craze. He was actually injured from what I could tell. He didn't want to put any weight on it.

I think he, as well as the Mallard in upper left of that page, show why I love drawing from life and why I'm happy to be devoting more time to it. This type of sketching can capture a unique moment in time. Some people don't see this and long for work of fine detail. But for others, and I think this includes most artists, there's nothing more satisfying than a quick sketch that seems to capture a moment, and gesture, in time.

Spring Will Out....

even if it is just a Palm Warbler in the Mud.

A quick watercolor based on a photo of a palm warbler seen at Oakdale Nature Preserve in Freeport, Illinois in April, 2008, in fairly wintry conditions.

We will forget about all I've said regarding values and tonal contrast for this one............... I remained somewhat true to the muddy conditions of the warbler's habitat. And though I thought of tonal variety as I worked it just seemed to disappear. I think the white paper, peeking through in places, counteracts the mud somewhat. I may do more work on this but most likely I'll just leave it as is. I fear more work will only make it darker and muddier.

The palm warbler truly is a sign of spring in our area though. Pine warblers are often earlier but less likely to be seen. But when you see the golden glow of the palm you know that spring is on its way!

Thoughts On/From Famous Artists , No. 1

For various reasons I haven't been able to do much artwork so far in 2009. But I have been reading. Often I incorporate what I've been reading into my posts about work that I'm doing. But the quotes don't always fit in and I sometimes tend to forget them.

So this is the first of what will probably be a series on thoughts from and about artists. I've been rereading George Miksch Sutton's "To a Young Bird Artist: Letters from Louis Agassiz Fuertes to George Miksch Sutton." The section that seems worth quoting concerns values, and colors.

On page 25 Fuertes says in a letter: "We are naturally blind to all but the most blatant & contrasting values, & even great painters -- especially of the earlier schools & periods never did get discriminating in this essential matter....Many old school painters understood contrast thoroughly, & played it like the masters that they were....Color subtlety is simplicity itself compared to value subtlety, which includes every possible element of color variation as thoroughly as does white light itself. Great pictures are full of ingenious tricks of color to overcome the failure of the painter to achieve his values."

Fuertes' point here was to show Sutton how to actually see the color of the birds that he painted. So for instance the bright red of a cardinal does not actually look red when it is in shadow. But I was more struck by the last line about 'ingenious tricks of color to overcome the failure of the painter to achieve his values.'

As I read this I couldn't help but think about art I like the best. Like many artists I like many types of art so it's hard to generalize. But if I try to generalize about what I like the BEST, I think it often includes rich tonal variety, almost an orchestration of value. Even more I wondered if it helped to explain how I've chosen color, especially in my abstract work.

The accompanying photos are of a wholly non-objective painting that I did in Kentucky in the early 1980s. I chose it because I think it really is more about color and shape than anything else. The brushwork is simple. There's no recognizable subject. I think that when I did it I really was just concerned with color and shape. But artists are rarely all that self-conscious about what they do. I didn't think about color and shape as I did the painting. But something guided me in my choice of color and shape.

After reading this quote from Fuertes I had to wonder if what guided my choice of color was really a search for an orchestration of values. It really sounded right to me as I read that passage. So I Photoshopped the color version of this painting into a black and white version.

I'm of course not an objective viewer of my own work. But it does seem to me that there is a rich variety of tone in the black and white version. I'm happy with it and for me at least it has a singing tonal quality. I think I'd say this if the work wasn't mine as well. I could be wrong.

In either case I think that Fuertes was right in his way. I never consciously think about value in my work, neither 25 years ago when I painted this, nor now. But subconsciously I think that I was choosing my colors based on a bright orchestration of values.

I remember when I first started studying art, both on my own and in school. There were those horribly dull charts of black, white and every shade of gray in between. Dullsville! But many years later it's hard for me to think of anything that makes a painting, or drawing, more vibrant and exciting than a good use of values.