Marvelously Elusive
The marvel of bird eggs never escapes me. But painting them to perfection almost always proves elusive. I’ve been at it for years. I found these paintings done over the last 10 years in the back of my art file drawer this week and was reminded of the value of practice. Over and over, year after year, I learn, make mistakes, improve, try again. The trick with eggs is getting the edges clean and precise, while adding multiple layers of paint so that the egg takes shape. You can see that some… Read More
Mystery Nest
Tangled in a thicket at the edge of a wooded wetland, the nest stood out like the prize it was for hiking on a cold winter day. As readers of this blog know by now, finding and painting nests is a recurring theme and a true pleasure for me. In fact, the subject of my first post was a nest. But this one is quite unique—almost two nests combined, it seems to me. It’s possible that a nest begun by one pair of birds was co-opted by another species, as sometimes happens;… Read More
Winter Birds
A solitary half-dead dogwood and a tangled hedgerow of vines and shrubs is all the landscaping that came with our house when we bought it last September. It’s not much, as they say, but it’s home. And, it turns out, it’s home to a surprising variety of birds as well. They are attracted mainly to the bird feeders we hung from the dogwood, though the shelter of the hedgerow and a neighboring elm provide good cover, too. For the price of sunflower seed and suet cakes, I’m enjoying the show from my… Read More
In Cold Rain
A cold rain is falling on the winter beach. A solitary loon, a few surf scoters, and a flock of bufflehead bob in the steely-gray water, disappearing now and again beneath the waves. This is no day for sketching seabirds. I retreat to the car and drive to a windswept spit of land that divides ocean from tidal marsh. A flock of gulls are right where I had hoped they’d be at the edge of the parking area, facing into the wind, occasionally preening or picking at clams or flying up and… Read More
Spreading Magic
‘Tis the season to spread a little magic! If you’ve ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters, you know what a gem they are. Full of beautiful illustrations and humorous stories, the letters Tolkien wrote to his children from Father Christmas spanned 20 years from 1920 to 1942. Those letters inspired me to pick up Santa’s pen when my children were growing up and, years later, to continue the tradition with letters to my neighbor’s children, now ages nine and seven. I often do a little research on the North Pole to put… Read More
Holiday Rush
Forget shopping. Making and giving holiday gifts is one of the things I like best about the holidays…but the final rush is definitely here. With a week to go before Christmas, creative ideas and good intentions are flowing as fast as the hourglass fills. So…a quick post today of one of my latest projects.
The Pember Collection
A Victorian glass and cherry cabinet full of nests and eggs, collected in the late-1800s, stretches 15-feet from end to end at the Pember Museum of Natural History in Granville, NY. I’ve been going to the museum once a year for the last 10 years and I never tire of that case. The variety of the collection astounds me; I will never exhaust its sketching possibilities. I spent two hours absorbed the details of 125 year old nests before running out of time on my recent visit. If only the birds knew… Read More
Making Muffins
What could be better on a cold Sunday in November than baking, eating, and painting muffins? And while there’s no recipe for painting muffins, I scanned this several times while in progress to share how I approached it. I painted this on Fabriano soft press 140lb watercolor paper in a handmade journal, using a limited palette of alizarin crimson, quinacridone gold, and phthalo blue. That’s not a combination I typically use, but I wanted to try it. I also added a little burnt sienna toward the end. Eat, paint, enjoy!
The Things We Take for Granted
I take the beauty of fall for granted. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate it or that I am not awed by its glory. Only that I take for granted that it will be so, year after year. For those of us who live in the Northeast, it is a given that winters will be cold and long, that spring will burst forth in birdsong and flowers, that summer will be prized for its heat and fullness, and that autumn will complete the year with a cloak of gold. I… Read More
Gone, but not forgotten
The woods are falling silent. Save for the call of jays and crows and the occasional chatter of chickadees and nuthatches, our songbirds have all flown to summer in the southern hemisphere. So, while it may seem odd to be painting yellow warblers in November, I am not quite ready to take up brown and blue paint and focus on winter birds just yet. This painting began in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, where I recently sketched yellow warblers perched in display cases. Back at home, I worked from those… Read More
Drawn In 