Perched
While the weather is frightfully cold and icy, I’m content to perch at my desk to paint. And speaking of perched, I’m having a great time teaching Birds and Words online at Winslow Art Center. Participants have been hard at work practicing lettering, layouts, and different ways to put birds together with words, quotes, and poems. This week we worked on perching birds on letters—a fun way to shine the spotlight on our avian neighbors and record what birds are hanging out and surviving the cold this February. Tips & Techniques– Watercolor… Read More
Acrobats in the Freezing Wind
I remember the first time I saw a starling, now at least 35 years ago. I was in a bank parking lot and a small flock was strutting and pecking around on the lawn. I thought they were such extraordinary birds—as Mary Oliver writes, “chunky and noisy but with stars in their black feathers”—and I excitedly went home to look up my find. When I discovered they were ordinary European starlings, I felt foolish. If I was going to get to know birds, I was going to have to do better. Now… Read More
From the Collection
I’m taking advantage of bitterly cold days to paint a few bird nests that I’ve wanted to spend time with from the collection of the New York State Museum in Albany. Maybe that seems like an odd thing—spending time with a bird nest—but I find that when I am doing a detailed drawing and painting like this, I can’t help but think about the bird that made it, the young that fledged from it, the materials it is made of, the weather it survived, and the person who collected it. In this… Read More
Becoming part of the silence
I love this quote by Irish writer Robert Lynd. “In order to see birds, it is necessary to become part of the silence.” He seems to have understood something profoundly true. Though we may see birds every day—by happenstance or on purpose– really knowing birds requires being quiet enough to enter their world. Unseen. Unobtrusive. Observant. I can honestly admit that I hardly do it enough. But when it happens, whether for just a moment or an hour, it’s a special thing. Tips & Techniques- If you are doing a piece like… Read More
Retreat
The sketches I’m posting today are from my weekend teaching at the Botanical Art & Nature Sketching Retreat at the Ashokan Center in New York’s Catskill Mountains earlier in November. Sixty-eight people from all over the country came for the weekend and it was an incredible convergence of artists. I was honored to teach alongside extraordinary botanical artists Wendy Hollender, Lara Call Gastinger, and GiacoMina Ferrillo, and to be in the company of so many warm, enthusiastic, and supportive people. Given my brother’s deteriorating health, I wasn’t sure whether to go but… Read More
Diving into Seaweed
How often have you walked along the seashore or a rocky beach and not given a second glance at one of the most important players in the ocean: seaweed. Seaweed, or marine algae, live in the marginal world between the tides and in deeper waters where sunlight still penetrates. Arguably, they are the key to life for the world’s oceans and the larger species that we notice and care about. But as an artist, the variety, color, and beauty of algae are just as fascinating. Seaweeds are identified and grouped by the… Read More
Leap of Faith
With nesting season over and summer on the wane, birds have quietly started to leave us. Most go south, making incredible journeys across land and ocean. But others simply go out to sea, where they spend the winter riding the waves. The beloved Atlantic Puffin is one such seafarer. Along rugged coasts in the North Atlantic, young birds born just this year jump from islands and cliffs where they were reared and head out into the open ocean alone. Their parents do the same, spending the next eight months at sea. I… Read More
Hidden in Plain Sight
Most birds protect and conceal their eggs in carefully constructed nests, in tree cavities or underground burrows, or high on rocky ledges and sea cliffs. Not so with terns. These seabirds nest together in colonies and lay their eggs right on the ground on small islands and stony beaches. Terns make just a small scrape on the ground and the females add beach debris or dead vegetation, shell fragments, or stones to provide some camouflage. The beauty and success of this strategy lies with the eggs and chicks themselves, whose markings blend… Read More
Two Terns
Out of the fog the terns come calling. I hear their chatter over the waves before I see them, and then, there they are, rapid wing beats passing overhead. More emerge from the mist. They hover over the water and then fall from the sky, striking small fish below the surface. As luck would have it, I’m at Gooseberry Neck this morning, a small spit of an island in southern Massachusetts that attracts seabirds, shorebirds, and songbirds to its open water, rocky beaches, and shrubby interior. I’m grateful to be in the… Read More
International Guillemot Appreciation Day
IGAD! It’s a big day for guillemots. If these small seabirds only knew that there are people around the world championing them today! Would they puff out their chests with pride, flash their white wing patches, or wave their bright red feet in the air? Or, perhaps, unassuming as they are, they would go about their usual seabird business, diving for fish, cruising the waves, tending their young. This auspicious day was begun some 32 years ago by a group of seabird researchers in Maine. Noting the lack of attention paid the… Read More
Drawn In 