On My Desk
Feathery milkweed pods sit on my desk this week next to a stack of field guides, a large tome on the beginnings of modern natural history, and flyers for holiday strolls. Rounding out the desktop: pens, ink cartridges, notes with art class ideas, receipts, and the usual assortment of brushes, pens, and paints. Outside my window: gray, cold December. Tis the season for messy desks, indoor confinement, and more project ideas than time. Amidst the clutter, I’ve been putting a new fountain pen with an extra fine nib through the paces to… Read More
Mother Lode
After a season marked by a dearth of mushrooms I found a mother lode of amanita growing under a large spruce tree just down the road last week. They were so colorful and numerous I could hardly wait to go back home and retrieve my sketchbook. When I nestled under the branches later in the day to sketch, I was surprised by the driver of a passing car who rolled down his window and called out—“Amazing mushrooms!” This was a first. I’ve had people slow down to see what I’m doing, and… Read More
Something Old and New
I bought a leather-bound journal with lovely cream-colored laid paper with deckled edges while in Italy. It’s not suited to watercolors, but it’s good for ink sketches, which I’ve been eager to do more of using sepia ink. Brown inks, including sepia (originally derived from cuttlefish), bistre (made from the residue found in chimney stacks), and iron gall (made from the tannins in oak galls and iron), were frequently used for drawing and light washes during the Renaissance (think Leonardo Da Vinci or Rembrandt drawings). I love the way that brown inks… Read More
Sketching the Nature of Umbria
I had an exceptional week teaching in the Italian countryside in Umbria with Winslow Art Center, and I couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic group of participants. There is a quote that I shared with them from Italian painter Cennino Cennini (c.1360 to 1427), “Now then, you of noble mind, who love this profession, come at once to art and accept these precepts: enthusiasm, reverence, obedience, and perseverance.” Obedience aside, it exemplified the way in which they approached the lessons and techniques I shared throughout the week. As you can see,… Read More
Once in a Lifetime Sighting
Have you ever had a wildlife sighting that is likely to be the only one you’ll ever have of that species? For me, these have typically been extraordinary moments: a California condor soaring below me while hiking the steep cliffs to Angels Landing at Arches National Park; walking past a field of Tule elk in the dark at a campground in the Redwoods in California; coming upon bobcat kittens playing in the road by our house. And last week, I discovered a wood turtle larger than my hand eating a mushroom in… Read More
Stopped in My Tracks
While out for a run last week, this giant mushroom on the side of the road quite literally stopped me in my tracks. I took a quick look and knew I had to sketch it. Driven by curiosity and enthusiasm, I managed one of my fastest two miles in recent memory completing a loop that led me back to it. The mushroom was so large it wouldn’t fit life-sized in my sketchbook, so I used a 9×12” sheet of watercolor paper. I’ve since returned to the small grouping of mushrooms where this… Read More
Front and Center
I have several half-finished flower paintings in my sketchbook and allium in bloom that’s calling me from the garden. A Louisiana waterthrush is singing to beat the band by the streamside and a blue-winged warbler just showed up in the thicket by the woods, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to capture them—yet. I just wrapped up teaching The Art of the Bird, so nests have been very much front and center on my desk. At risk of seeming single-minded, I hope you’ll indulge me with another nest posting before… Read More
Low Tide Sampler
I’m continuing to explore tidepool life from our recent trip to California, while it snows on our daffodils here in New York. This Low Tide Sampler includes several phyla of animals commonly found along the coast. Species within each group share characteristic traits and, once you get to know them, it becomes easier to identify species that are new to you and to recognize features that resemble their relatives. The Pacific sand dollar, for example, is like a flattened sea urchin; its five starred pattern resembles its relatives, the starfish. I especially… Read More
Deep Dive
I had the privilege of doing a deep dive into two incredible collections at Scripps Institution of Oceanography while visiting California last week. The Marine Vertebrate Collection contains two million preserved fish specimens representing 5,600 species. The benthic invertebrates include 800,000 specimens and 7,600 species. These have been collected over decades from diverse marine habitats, including coral reefs, seamounts, hydrothermal vents, hydrocarbon seeps, the abyssal plain, and deep trenches. If you don’t mind dead creatures in glass jars, it’s awesome. The curators of both collections gave me time to wander through the… Read More
Lasting Construction
The Eastern Towhee is a bird of forest edges and shrubby fields where they scratch around on the ground for seeds, fruits, grains, and insects. I see them occasionally foraging under our shrubs and I hear them frequently in spring and summer calling from the brushy field bordering our property. What I’ll never see is their nest in the wild, which is always well concealed on the ground. Hence, I put the towhee on my short list of nests to pull from the shelves when I visited the NYS Museum ornithology collection… Read More
Jean Mackay
The Nature Explorer’s Sketchbook
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Drawn In 