Completed Reduction Woodcut, Awakened Sketchbook

Moleskine Sketchbook with Woodpecker Field Sketches and Carving Tools in Studio. Photo by Ken Januski.

As I was winding up the reduction woodcut I've been working on I kept noticing my poor neglected sketchbook off to the left of my cutting area. Though I take it out with me when I'm out birding I just can't convince myself to take it out and sketch in winter. The top sketch in photo above of a Hairy Woodpecker, conveniently outside my warm studio window is from December 28th. The page to the left has an Osprey from late November.

Today was particularly cold due to the wind so even though we watched a handsome male Pileated Woodpecker for at least 15 minutes I didn't sketch. But when I got home the guilt was just too strong. I HAD to resume sketching. So the photo at the bottom is the male Pileated from memory. It's not much but at least I'm reviving the habit.

Back when I was reading a lot about Winslow Homer, one of my favorite watercolorists, I read how he worked in his studio in Maine during the winter on his oil paintings. Everything in its place more or less with watercolors in the field in warmer weather and oils in the studio in winter.

So it's really not surprising that I should do more prints in winter, and more sketches from photos. But still it's nice to work from life, or at least from memories from life.

American Goldfinch, Great Blue Heron and Killdeer Along Snowy Banks of Manayunk Canal. Final Edition of Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Another reason I felt like sketching, and birding, is that I've finally finished the reduction woodcut! And I'm happy with it. The final version is above. I'm still not sure how many of the prints will go into the edition. I started off with 16 but there are a lot more prints will small smudges than I'd like. So I still have to figure out which ones will be in the edition. The more the better though, because I really like this print!

Drawing With a Brush

Solitary Sandpipers. Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

While out enjoying the cool weather early this morning I ran across a Solitary Sandpiper. Every time I see one I realize that if I want to portray them believably, even if abstracted or stylized, I need to understand them better. In particular I need to understand where the head and neck are in relation to their slim elegant torso when they're bent over hunting for food.

I'd thought that I'd been pretty successful as I kept reworking the field sketch below to get the outline right. Only now that I see it online do I realize how many problems it has. But no matter. It convinced me to spend some time sketching them from the many photos that I've taken, mainly within 5 miles of home, over the years.

I took up a method of painting that I used to love in order to do these sketches: sketching with a brush using a wash. I used to use India ink and Chinese brushes. This time I used watered down watercolor and my normal watercolor brushes.

There is something exhilarating in working like this. Part of the exhilaration is that you can fail pretty quickly! Since you have to make big strokes that encompass much of the shape of whatever you're drawing it's easy to get it wrong, and see that it's wrong. Oddly this adds to the excitement and tends to keep you focused. There's really no room to be tentative.

Because it's a light wash it's also possible to make other darker corrective lines without the drawing looking too bad. So it's far more forgiving than it at first might seem.

Perhaps best of all it combines drawing and painting. This is really just about the main problem for most realistic artists I think: are you painting or are you drawing? Does line, often outline, matter most or does mass, and sometimes color, matter most? Skilled artists learn to get some lines from the edges of color masses without enclosing everything in an outline or within strict edges. A great example of this is Winslow Homer.

He started off wedded firmly to line and outline. By the end of his career most line was implicit not explicit. He added line in subtle ways. Wash drawings like this really do meld both line and mass, and can easily include color as well. Of course the masters of this method are Chinese and Japanese artists. Hokusai immediately comes to mind but I haven't really studied art of that part of the world well enough to know all of the other skilled artists.  If you look at Hokusai though you can see an incredible fluidity. He was a master!

So having stumbled accidentally upon this method of working today I'm quite pleased. I'm forced to simplify the shapes of things and in doing so to make a commitment to what I think they should be. It's a great way to work and I suspect I'll be doing a lot more of it.

Below is the field sketch of Solitary Sandpiper, as well as Green Heron on a log, that sent me off in this direction.

Green Heron on Log and Solitary Sandpiper. Ballpoint Pen Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

More Migrating Warblers and my Favorite Watercolorists

Northern Parula. Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski

I might as well say right off that the watercolor sketch above is pretty horrible. I recently saw this first year/fall female Northern Parula at Houston Meadows in Philadelphia. It was a beautiful little bird flitting around too quickly for me even to identify it with any certainty let alone do a sketch.

I did take a number of photos and two turned out. So I thought I'd use the best as the source of this watercolor sketch in the pages of a small Stillman and Birn Zeta sketchbook.  As usual it shows the dangers of basing anything on photos. When you do so you often copy what's in the photo rather than follow an idea in your mind, one that firmly understands the structure of the bird, and has thought about the placement of the other objects in the painting.

Often with sketches I'll just start with the photo and improvise as I go. Since it's just a sketch, unlike the watercolor of the Least Sandpipers. I have a lot of leeway. But really I don't. Even though this is sketchier it still shows a lack of conviction and sureness that just adds up to a dull little watercolor, in spite of its striking subject.

So I'm not at all pleased with it. Later I'll get to the work of watercolorists I am very pleased with. Since I feel free to criticize so much work in watercolor it's only fair to show what I consider good examples of watercolor.

But first I just wanted to mention the slow but steady flood of warblers that are migrating through. Recently I've seen Blackburnian, Tennessee, Black-throated Green, Chestnut-sided Warblers, along with American Redstarts, the Northern Parula above and of course the locally breeding Common Yellowthroats. Today I was also treated to two Great Horned Owls, and yesterday an early morning Common Nighthawk doing blazingly fast acrobatics across the sky. It is a good time to be able to be out and about. I'd love to capture that nighthawk but it seems almost too impossible to even try.

While taking a break from birding and artwork today I was skimming through Treasures of the Forgotten Forest, published by the Artists for Nature foundation about the Tumbesian region of Peru and Ecuador. As I leafed through it I realized how many examples of the artists who took part in it were in watercolor. Almost all have a freedom, freshness, creativity and boldness that accentuate the boldness of watercolor itself rather than deny it its soul, more or less, by painting within tight little contour lines, never a brushmark out of place.

The more I've done wildlife art, and looked at wildlife art shows, particularly bird art shows the sadder I get. So much of it just so lifeless. There is no other way to say it: it is lifeless. Quite an irony given the vitality of the subject matter. But looking at this book you see the opposite: examples of artists whose work complements nature's vitality. I can't really show the illustrations from the book so I'll just name some of the artists in it. I'm familiar with almost all of them and have seen their work elsewhere, but this book seems almost by accident I think to show a lot of watercolor.

So if you get a chance look online for examples of, or perhaps buy a book by, the following artists: Barry Van Dusen, Lars Jonsson, Kim Atkinson, Darren Woodhead, Vadim Gorbatov, Bruce Pearson, Juan Varela Simo, Michael Warren, Wolfgang Weber. There are also other artists in the book but I've named just the ones whose watercolor work is so striking. If you perhaps are able to see the book itself I think you'll also see how varied their work is.

Before I accidentally picked up that book I had planned to choose some of my favorite watercolor paintings by Winslow Homer, perhaps America's best watercolorist. But before I did I looked through my book of John Singer Sargent's watercolors. Maybe HE's America's best watercolorist. Who knows? Both show how exciting watercolor can be and how it can be just as ambitious and powerful as oil painting. So here's a small list of some of my favorite watercolors by each:

Winslow Homer:
1.The Blue Boat
2.Saguenay River, Lower Rapids
3.In the Jungle, Florida
4.Shooting the Rapids
5.Under the Falls, the Grand Discharge
6.The Adirondack Guide
7.A Garden in Nassau
8."For to be a Farmer's Boy", the last not because it's my favorite but because of the loose way that he handled the pumpkin vines and field. It's a great example of how to paint with watercolor rather than use watercolor washes to fill in a drawing.

John Singer Sargent:
1.A Tent in the Rockies
2.Lake Louise, Canadian Rockies, an incredibly bold painting, esp. for  its time.
3.Derelicts, boats not people
4.The Bathers
5.Muddy Alligators
6.Gourds
7.La Biancheria
8.Carrarra: Quarry II
9.Mountain Stream
10.Bus Horses in Jerusalem.

These are just a few. As I've flipped through my Homer and Sargent watercolor books as I've written this I keep coming across new ones that I'd like to add. But this should give you a taste. I've included Homer's In the Jungle and Sargent's Muddy Alligators because both have wildlife, non-bird wildlife as subject. And yet you can bet you will never, ever see work of this quality in a wildlife art show. Sad but true.

All in all I think what's struck me about their work is that they truly do use watercolor to paint, not to color in lines. That is probably the main reason that I think so highly of them and so little of watercolors that just color in the lines, a method by the way with which Homer began his career.

When I say how disappointed I am with my own watercolors, especially the sketches, it's because I want to some day do work like the artists I've mentioned here.

Another Return - Watercolor

Three Least Sandpipers at Morris Arboretum. Watercolor by Ken Januski. Last version.

Three Least Sandpipers at Morris Arboretum. Watercolor by Ken Januski. First version.

I have no idea when the last time I did a watercolor was, probably more than a year. I have done numerous watercolor sketches, the most recent just yesterday. But they are different. They're just sketches and they're not done on good watercolor paper. Though the paper I use is great for sketches it doesn't have the brightness and more importantly the robustness of true watercolor paper. I can only make so many changes before the color gets muddy and the paper no longer accepts the paint.

There are many reasons for my not doing watercolors but the main reason is fear of failure, abysmal failure. I've quoted before the great, perhaps greatest American watercolorist Winslow Homer, on watercolor: it is making the best of an emergency.

What in the world does this mean? It makes perfect sense to me so I'll say what I think it means. Watercolor dies a horrible death if it doesn't retain both spontaneity and freshness. It's greatest strength is the vibrancy that it can create through its basic property of transparency. Winslow Homer knew this. But it also doesn't want to be held by boundaries. Neither does oil painting.

Though there are some great oil painters, David comes to my for instance, who tended to paint within the lines many great painters didn't, for instance Rembrandt. For them painting is, I think, an orchestration and weaving of marks across the entire canvas. The heavy impasto of Rembrandt doesn't stay within any boundaries. By painting in such a way the viewer himself is able to put together all those marks and see what is probably a more realistic portrayal than that of paintings that stay within the lines. Of course the Impressionists also tried to get away from line and outlines, saying that's not really the way we see. Look out the window and I'm sure you'll agree. Where is the line that defines the edge of that tree?

In any case there are some watercolor painters, Homer for instance, who try to paint like Rembrandt but in transparent watercolor. The problem? In watercolor you can't successfully paint white or any lighter color over a darker color. That's the nature of transparency. Transparency both makes watercolor the vibrant medium that it can be and also makes it just about the most difficult medium that there is to use, at least as a painting medium.

I think it's that knowledge that you might be putting down an irreversibly bad color or mark that Homer was talking about. When you do you either give up, or try to think of some way to salvage it. Thus watercolor is always an emergency.

I can't stand paint within the line watercolors, though I'm sure someone could point out some exception to that rule, perhaps Charles Demuth, who vaguely stayed within the lines. But for me painstaking dabs of watercolor, kept within the lines is just of no interest. It almost makes my skin crawl because it seems such a betrayal of the beauty of watercolor. It demands skill no doubt. But the end result is deadly. I should add that there are some contemporary bird artists that I know of who use watercolor in a fresh way. They stay close to the lines but still manage not to be inhibited by them. The watercolors still are fresh and lively.

But these artists are masters of the medium. I'm not, not by a very, very long shot. So I know that when I choose to do a watercolor I'll soon have an emergency. And yet the beauty of watercolor, when used as a transparent, painterly medium is irresistible. So I finally gave it a try with the Least Sandpipers above.

My watercolors have never been as well received as my prints. I'm not surprised because I know how far I have to go to master the medium in a way that I'm happy with. But still I can't help but try it again, every once in a while.

Most likely the painting is done. It is painted on 9x12 inch 300# Arches watercolor paper.

Well perhaps the painting SHOULD have been done. I couldn't resist a few changes. The newest version is at top.

Northern Watercolor Sketches

Northern Mockingbird in Tangle. Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

Northern Cardinal in Conifers. Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

Since I wrote my last somewhat theoretical post I've been tempted to write many more. That's the problem when you get involved in theory. It's like quicksand. You keep sinking in deeper and deeper. Each theory leads to another, or to a different point of view, etc., etc. I'm sure that's why so often artists are given the advice to work, not theorize. So I decided not to get involved with theory again for a bit.

With that in mind I was looking through some of the many photos I've taken over the years to see if anything struck me as inspirational. I'd  also been through my sketchbooks without success. But I also noticed how very many of the prints I've done have been based on quick sketches. You just never know.

For today though I was struck by revealing poses of two birds with 'Northern' in their name: the Northern Mockingbird at top and the Northern Cardinal beneath him. Perhaps because the cardinal is so common I rarely take photos of him. And yet every time I go to sketch him, or her, from life I realize how little I know.

So occasionally I'll notice a photo, perhaps taken for that exact reason, that gives a fairly clear picture of the structure of a bird, from top to bottom, bill to tail and head to toe. That's how both the cardinal and the mockingbird struck me.

I also hate to just make a sketch. It's a never ending challenge to put a bird in a believable environment. So all the practice I can get with that, even if it ends in failure as they so often do, is worth the effort. In both watercolors I've tried to add the semblance of an environment as well as the semblance of a composition.

Both of these are done in a 7x10 inch Stillman and Birn Gamma sketchbook. I like doing pencil sketches in them and they're also strong enough to carry a few layers of watercolor washes, though usually I push them a bit further than their capacity as I try to fix mistakes. Still they are really perfect for watercolor sketches such as this.

I once was in a juried show that was jurored by a watercolorist. I had high hopes for my new watercolors but neither got in as I recall. It was easy to see why. They didn't stay within the lines. They didn't have clean washes, just as the sketches above don't. That's the way that the juror worked and most of the watercolors juried in were in that style. It's a very pervasive style.

I'd never argue that it didn't take skill. It does. But to me it also kills off the painting. Why do watercolor if you don't let the paper breathe, letting areas of the paper sparkle through? The most noticeable thing about watercolor is its transparency, its ability to create a type of light-filled paper that no other medium can. Anyone who studies the watercolors of the great American watercolorist Winslow Homer will see that he went gradually from the opaque, within-the-lines school to work that sparkled and rarely stayed within the lines. Guess which work he's remembered for?

As usual when I cite a famous artist I'm not claiming that I'm in that tradition. But I often find that they exemplify much of what I find exciting and admirable in art.

As I said I did these primarily to help me understand the structure of these two birds. So most likely I'll never do anything that uses them directly. But when I finally do a print or more developed painting that includes one of these two birds I'm sure that these two sketches will have helped them out.

Taking a Chance

Many years ago when I first started taking art courses in the San Francisco area, even though I'd made art on my own since I was a child, there was one course that was a revelation to me: Oriental Brush Painting, as I think it was called. What was so unusual and revelatory was the importance of the brush mark. Each mark was important, not just the overall drawing/painting/impression.

This was made even more noticeable in the actual practice of painting.  The rice paper we painted on had a consistency similar to toilet paper. The black ink on the brush seemed to leap off the brush, even before it touched the paper, and form an indecipherable blob rather than the graceful mark I sought. What this taught me I think is that it's possible to make art that contains the most graceful and expressive marks, which are themselves a major component of the art.

This course was only one semester long and I never began to master it. Still I've never lost my appreciation for it. So when I took  up watercolor, after only the briefest foray into it as a student at Berkeley, I was quickly  reminded of the importance of marks. Watercolor is not as absorbent as the rice paper I used to use but still an inelegant mark can show up as just that: inelegant. It's much harder to cover over such inelegance as you can in oil or acrylic.

On the other hand some of my  favorite watercolor artists such as Winslow Homer did seem to cover over areas. As far as  I can tell Homer really wasn't all that interested in elegant marks. And no one can argue with his success as an artist. He's probably my favorite watercolor artist.

I mentioned in my last post how the realism of the sketches I've done recently  might soon be replaced by more abstract work, especially since I started reading Wildlife in Printmaking by Carry Akroyd. That is exactly what has happened in the 9x12 watercolor above. It revisits a familiar theme: shorebirds at high tide on Nummy Island. This one includes a Red Knot, as well as Short-billed Dowitcher, Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin.

In it I've tried to keep more of the white of the paper, to accentuate a variety of marks, and to avoid too much detail in the birds, or anything else for that matter. I've always liked more abstract art and the Akroyd book reminds me of how much I like that sort of art. When I used to be an abstract artist I'd always use a musical analogy to try  to explain it to befuddled onlookers. Most people don't demand that music tell a story or paint a picture. They react to the non-verbal music itself, to the melody, rhythm, etc.

These are also important elements in art and are often noticed most in decorative arts though not completely. Architecture also makes much  use of pattern and rhythm. When you use something like that in a  painting you  have to decide whether to sublimate accuracy for rhythm and pattern. I've made a first attempt at that here.

Over the last few years I've occasionally  made a painting that drifted in this direction then scuttled back to the safety of realism, which of course there's nothing wrong with. But my artistic background has always been much more appreciative of marks, of pattern, of design. So once again  I'm taking a chance on that direction. This time I hope I can stay with it a bit longer.

My linocuts I think do tend much more in this direction. But I've wanted to do it in painting  for quite awhile and keep getting scared off. Hopefully this time will be different.

'Wildlife Art' and Me

I began drawing and painting birds in late 2006. The inspiration, outside of years of birdwatching, was the book 'Drawing Birds' by John Busby. I loved the plein air versions of birds that I found in it. They crackled with life. My own artistic background, outside of 3-5 years drawing insects in pen and ink viewed under a microscope, was 20-25 years of mainly abstract or non-objective work.

But I'd become very disillusioned with the art world and had stopped doing abstract art. After reading 'Drawing Birds' I was so excited about what I saw that I decided to try my hand at naturalistic art, using birds as subjects. The small watercolor at top, of shorebirds at Nummy Island near Cape May, NJ was my first bird watercolor. It was done in late 2006.

But I soon ran into a problem. As I started looking at 'wildilfe art', includng 'bird art', I found that most of it just left me cold. I don't want to elaborate on that here. If I had to generalize I'd say that it felt overly-precise and lacking in life.

My purpose in this post is not to criticize though. It's actually to mention two sites that I've found recently that remind me of the possibility of exciting 'bird art.' Both sites are listed on the right side of this page. The first is Nick Derry's blog. Though Nick also has a web site with more finished work this blog shows his sketches from life. I think that they are really exciting. The second site is a publisher, The Langford Press. The site is a bit clunky and has some broken links. But it also lists a number of wildlife-related books, part of the Wildlife Art Series, that look very interesting. I notice that some of the artists who publish there are also artists whose work I admired in 'Drawing Birds.'

I also reviewed 'Lars Jonsonn's Birds' at Amazon earlier this year and it is a stunning example of someone who does work that is both naturalistic and artful. So this is turning out to be a good year for me and 'wildlife art.' I keep finding more and more that I really like.

There is of course a great tradition of European and American artists who have been great artists while still using naturalistic subject matter. Durer, Courbet and Homer spring instantly to mind. But that seems less true since the 1900s. This is a huge subject that I really don't want to tackle in any depth. It may be due to the decline in popularity of representational art in the 'high art' world during most of the 20th century. But for whatever reason it seems to me that the most accomplished art and naturalistic art have been two different genres for 100 years or more. I don't see any reason that this should be the case. And I'm very happy whenever I find naturalistic art which also seems to be in the tradition of the best and most accomplished art. That's been the case this year.

Opacity - Refuge of Scoundrels

No, the opacity I'm talking about is not that of language, especially as exemplified by politicians, contemporary art critics, and economists. They probably all could vie for the Opacitator of the Year award. No what I'm talking about is opacity in watercolor.

Some people will know what I mean when I talk about this and others will probably roll their eyes. The best example I can give of this is Winslow Homer. I'm rereading one of my many books on him right now and once again I notice that as I look at his watercolors chronologically that they are skilled, accomplished and then out of the blue one day, they are really exciting. That is the day he abandons opaque watercolor for transparent watercolor. Some of the paintings(for example Applepicking) he did at Houghton Farm in New York in the late 1870s before going to Cullercoats, England are good examples. He achieves brightness as though he were painting in oils, by putting the lightest colors on top. So many of the highlights are light colors laid on top of dark colors. But you can't do this in watercolors. Except you can. IF you mix some opaque white with your colors. The white is more or less a new paper background and any color on it will be brighter, not limited through transparency to any darker colors underneath. But it comes at a price. The sparkling, luminous, transparent effect of watercolor is gone.

Sometime after his return from Cullercoats, and certainly by the time of his Adirondack paintings of the late 1880s, Homer more or less abandoned opaque watercolor for transparent watercolor, regardless of cost or difficulty. The result is a body of work that sings, the watercolors for which he's most famous.

I've always disliked opacity in watercolor so I've avoided it. Until today. I just couldn't think of any other way to salvage the reeds in this painting and make them regain the foreground. The results are mixed and I might try a little more work on it. But largely it's done. I do think it looks better than yesterday but I've lost some of the brilliance that is the main reason for working in watercolor. Still it seemed worth trying, at least this once.

Bewitching Secrets of Watercolor

The title is not mine, but a direct quote from "Watercolors of Winslow Homer: The Color of Light" by Martha Tedeschi, et al., from a show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In my last post I mentioned 'reveling in materials' as a motivation of myself and I think of many artists. You can say all you want about artists thoughts and writings, even my own thoughts and writings, but often it comes down to something much more simple: a great enjoyment in experimenting with the materials of art. My guess is that the same can be said for music.

In any case I was struck by this quote when I neared the end of the book today:

One can find here a metaphor for Homer's sustained relationship with watercolor itself. It was in this medium that the artist had conveyed his most immediate expressions and experiences while also clearly reveling in the beautiful effects that it alone allowed him to pursue. Over three decades of focused work and travel he had discovered the bewitching secrets of watercolor's unique marriage of color, water and light.


Homer was the master of 'reveling in the beautiful effects' of watercolor while at the same time being true to light, water, subject. It would be hard to find a better example for someone who wants to work in watercolor.

Winslow Homer - Baaad Example!

There is no doubt in my mind at all about who my favorite watercolor artist is: Winslow Homer. I couldn't say this about drawing or painting but I can about watercolor. So I was very happy to get a new Homer book for Christmas: 'Watercolors By Winslow Homer: The Color of Light' from my old haunt of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Art Institute of Chicago. While working my way through it today as I stared at some tentatively finished paintings in my studio I came across examples of his scraping and blotting to alter previously applied pigment. This is something I can use I thought.

A while later I decided to remove the staples that attached my 'Greater Blackbacked Gulls' watercolor from its stretcher board.

But after I had taken off a couple of staples I remembered what I'd said in an earlier post about the painting: it was really lacking in tonal variety. I'd also just read about how important tonal clarity was to Homer. As I looked at the painting I thought: What a dud!

So I went back to work on it, using scraping, blotting, erasing into wet paper, and variations on these to try to bring more tonal variety and clarity to the painting. I think that the new version is an improvement.

When I labeled this post 'Winslow Homer - Baaad Example' I of course wasn't criticizing Homer. My point is that the good example of quality art can persuade you to alter your own work, perhaps destroying it in the process. But that's really my artistic background. You work and work and work at a painting until it seems finished. For some artists this will be primarily a 'visual' finish. For others some other category/value is applied to determine finish. There have been many times where I've ruined a work by going back into it, sometimes with an idea that was brighter in my mind than when put into practice. But generally speaking you become a better artist by setting higher standards for yourself and not always settling for your first attempt at something.

But watercolor, particularly if you're new to it like I am, presents a dilemma. It's so easy to ruin the freshness of a watercolor by overwork. On the other hand Homer is a great example of ambition in watercolor. He shows you that you can go back into a watercolor and try to improve it, knowing that you may in fact ruin it, but also showing many great examples of exactly the opposite result. What a great example he sets for all watercolor artists!

Turkeys, Watercolor, Winslow Homer

Over the last week I've been looking at the work of my favorite watercolor artist, Winslow Homer, in the book 'The Watercolors of Winslow Homer' by Miles Unger. Each time I do I'm reminded of just how good watercolors can be. Looking at the book, laid out in more or less chronological order, it's easy to see Homer's growth away from his drafting skills. Homer was a very accomplished draftsman and this is most obvious in his early work. Drawn shapes remain an armature on which to hang his paintings in his later work but they really are just that: an armature, with which great liberties can be taken. The introduction to the book mentions how watercolor can excel, especially in Homer's work, in capturing light and atmosphere. These are almost always present in Homer's watercolors. The introduction also mentions that Homer never shies away from letting the mistakes or other evidence of the work of finishing the work remain visible. I think it is the combination of light, atmosphere, and fearlessness about showing artistic process that make him so appealing to me.

While working on two pastel drawings recently I found it refreshing to be able to be more carefree with them than I can be with the less familiar, and forgiving, medium of watercolor. But I had some misgivings about the health effects of breathing the fixatif needed to fix the pastel powder to the page. My online investigations only made me more concerned. So I decided to stop them for awhile and go back to watercolor. In preparation for that I took another look at the Homer book mentioned above. One thing that struck me was the rich, luminous but inexact washes that Homer would often use for part of the background. I thought I might be able to use this in my next watercolor.

I and my wife have seen Wild Turkeys in three places in Philadelphia over the last 15 years or so: Tinicum, the Schuylkill Center, and Northwestern Ave. near Morris Arboretum. We spent three hours of a beautiful day with weather in the high 70s at Morris Arboretum today. We saw no turkeys, but did see a total of 28 birds, including a Solitary Sandpiper, Green Heron, Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, 20 or more Wood Ducks and at least 12 Cedar Waxwings. A Wild Turkey would have fit right in, but it wasn't to be today. We did see one at Tinicum taken Memorial Day weekend, 2008. A photo of it is the basis for the accompanying watercolor.

Though I had taken a number of photos of the turkey I've been holding off on trying to do a painting due to the iridescence of the wings. How was I ever going to get any sense of that? It wasn't of paramount importance but I also thought it couldn't be ignored. But watercolor, as evidenced in Winslow Homer, can create very rich coloristic effects. I'm not sure if the iridescence comes through in this photo but I think that it does in the original. I'm happy with it.

Watercolor is a medium that can turn from brilliant luminosity to MUD in a matter of seconds. I think it is a medium that is best used with a solid draftsmanlike armature underneath. But for me it is a crime to be ruled by the armature. It is there as a lifeboat, not as a prison. I think that this is how Homer used it. For myself I think that there's a great danger of MUD if I don't also have my own fairly detailed drawing to start. That anchor, which I know is always there, allows me the freedom to let the paint speak for itself. My artistic background tends strongly in this direction. But it is greatly helped by the example of Winslow Homer.

One last thing that I think draws me so much to Winslow Homer: his love of nature. I don't think he was probably a bird lover though. The few paintings I've seen that include birds aren't among my favorites. But birds can be intimidating. It's easy to feel that every feather should be rendered. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it looks to me like Homer was a bit timid with birds and doesn't use the brash abstraction that he does with other parts of nature. He's somewhere in between his usual brash abstraction and a need to portray all the details of the bird.