Near Temptation of Lens

I've spent the last week thoroughly immersed in the wildlife artist forum of birdforum.com. I was led there by Jo through a reference to the work of Nick Derry in my last post. What an enjoyable trip it's been. There are some really, really good bird artists there. More important, at least to me, is that not only is it good but much of it is based on field work. It's both observation-based and artful.

To make a long story short the time spent there has convinced me that I really do need to spend more time working from life. There is just no way around it. Fieldwork is what keeps you connected to the subject. So today I forced myself to work from life. Today I stayed in the backyard. Tomorrow I may go afield, if I can convince my wife that she'd also enjoy it.

I knew that we have had a hummingbird around quite a bit the last two weeks so I wanted to see if I could get some sketches of it. And I knew I needed to avoid 'the near temptation of lens.' No photos. I wanted to draw what I saw with my naked eye, or through binoculars, unadulterated by a camera.

As you can see I managed a few very small hummingbird sketches. It just didn't sit still. The one time it looked like it might (see bird on wire) a robin landed on tomato cage and scared it away. That sketch is really from a mental image. Even the robin wouldn't sit still. So his sketch includes two composite views.

Unidentified wasps and beetles landed on my drawing table or on the honeysuckle next to my chair. So they also got included. I've spent years drawing insects under a microscope but this was one of the first drawing them live. Wasps don't sit much more still than birds. I haven't identified this one but if I have time I'll do so later. Actually I think I have identified it. It's one of the thread-waisted wasps: a mud-daubing wasp.

The final subjects are floral: a helenium just budding up, a half-spent monarda and a honeysuckle blossom. The hummingbirds love the monarda and the honeysuckle. As common as monarda is it is really a spectacular flower. I don't think most orchids can top it for exotic beauty, especially if you look closely at each flower.

There aren't any great drawings here. But it was great fun forcing myself to work from life. I enjoyed it so much I didn't even notice I was using my old nemesis, watercolor pencils and waterbrush.

'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.

Snowy Egret in Progress

I was so happy with my Laughing Gulls watercolor of last week that I've had it in my mind ever since then that I need to return to larger, looser watercolors. Outside of the small pen and ink insect drawings that I did about 10 years ago of insects viewed under a microscope I've always worked large. That changed when I took up birds as subject matter about three years ago as I explained in my post about the gulls. Because I'm so new to birds it seemed better to start small. But that can be inhibiting and after I finished the gull painting I found that there was a freedom in that painting that reminded me of my old abstract paintings.

I also enjoyed the process of doing a sketch and then testing colors before I began the real painting as I did with the Laughing Gulls. So today I looked through the many photographs I've taken of birds over the last year and decided to try a Snowy Egret seen at 'The Meadows' at Cape May this spring. I went from 7x10 paper to 11x14. The top two photos are of the preliminary sketch. The reflections in the water looked absolutely impossible but I was happy with the water in the gull painting so I wasn't intimidated by it.


Perhaps I ahould have been intimidated by the water and its reflections though, especially as I refused to use any masking medium to save the white paper where all the reeds were in front of the water. One day I'll probably need to take up the use of a masking medium. But today I decided to take my chances without it. You can probably see the problem. As I paint the water the brush goes into the foreground reeds and distorts them, or I shy away from them and end up with an odd white space surrounding them. But I decided to work this anyway. You never know what will happen until you try it.


I think I'm through with this for today. It's a bit duller than it looks online. And most of the reeds are disappointing. So most likely I'll see if there's anything I can do to rescue the reeds(I doubt it) and make the colors a bit more vibrant(more likely possible I think). I did what I wanted in this painting: work in a looser method. It hasn't been completely successful. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I suspect that I will continue to work in this fashion. I should add that I also suspect that this method will never be popular in the world of 'wildlife art.' Photographic precision seems to be more the norm there. That is fine. But I find no enjoyment in working that way. So most likely this painting is a harbinger of thimgs to come.

House Sparrows (and Echinacea) in Watercolor Pencil

House sparrows?! Who cares! Who wants to draw/paint/look at House Sparrows? Well this is easy to understand. In our backyard they outnumber other more interesting birds by about 10 to 1. Yes they are common. But they're still interesting birds and can make for good subjects. I believe it was a number of watercolor studies by Chloe Talbot-Kelly in 'Drawing Birds' by John Busby that convinced me you could make some very good drawings/paintings using them as subjects.

I've chosen them today because: 1) I vowed I'd finally do some work from life this summer when bad weather could no longer be an excuse; and 2) they were the only avian subjects that would sit still. A Ruby-Throated Hummingbird made a 5 second appearance but you can't draw much in that short time.

The accompanying sketches are nothing special, though I'm satisfied with them. But I'm so much happier with watercolor pencils now that I'm using a better quality paper, and now that I'm being more patient and not going back into the painting while it is still wet. The new Moleskin watercolor sketchpad is a great help. It seems a bit expensive but for me it's been worth it. What a pleasure to not worry about the quality of the paper, not worry about buckling.

As I've said many times before, so many that you might think 'he doth protest too much', I do believe that you get better art when working from life. There is a connection to the subject matter that is just missing when working from photos. But I've done very little work from life recently in spite of all my claims of its superiority.

So I hope that this will be the start of a real effort on my part to work more from life. I'm sure I'll continue to work from photos, maybe as soon as this afternoon or tomorrow. But I also want to spend more time working from life. I'm sure all of my work will improve in quality as I do so.

One last thought. You might wonder, well why doesn't he show more detail in the birds? Simple, they were too far away to see any detail except with binoculars or scope. So for today the challenge was to do sketches of them knowing that I wouldn't be able to include much detail. My answer was to include more of their surroundings. I've never really painted the sky before and haven't had much luck, or patience, with foliage. But I had no choice today. The birds were so far away as to be very small. That meant taking on skies and foliage.

It was such a nice day, low 80s with a breeze, that I found myself back outside later in the afternoon, after posting this. The Echinacea Pallida continued to call out to be painted, especially with the nearby sunflower and the Bronze Fennel behind. So here is version number two(I tried this for the first time last weekend).

It still leaves something to be desired. The details of the Echinacea are lost. The fennel is just so airy that it's hard to render in paint. And I'm still overwhelmed by all the foliage of the sunflower and the Echinacea. Still it's enough of a challenge, and the results good enough, that I'm sure I'll keep trying to do a good painting of this subject.

Gulls, Echinacea Pallida, Fennel

I made some really tiny changes to this watercolor of Laughing Gulls from yesterday. They were so minor that I decided not to post the new version. I also decided to stop with minor changes before I killed any vibrancy that I achieved yesterday.



But then my wife pointed out that it was dry in the backyard for the first time in weeks and there was a nice breeze. So I took the opportunity to go sit in the yard, bringing my new Moleskin watercolor sketchbook with me. It was time to inaugurate it. There really wasn't much to see other than undifferentiated green. But the Echinacea Pallidas were just starting to bloom and the Bronze Fennel behind them was a nice color counterpoint. I have to add that I love the shape of this somewhat unusual Echinacea. It asks to be drawn, actually in much greater detail than I've done here.

This is just a quick watercolor pencil sketch from life, on good paper. I only had 5 colors, none of them green, so that was a problem when faced with a sea of green. Still it was enjoyable to experiment. It was much more enjoyable using a sturdier paper. When I came back in I used a real watercolor wash of Hooker's Green I think to add a little bit of green to the picture.

Since I was posting this sketch I thought I might as well include the finished Laughing Gulls as well.

Laughing Gulls in Watercolor

I'm sure I've mentioned before that my background in art is primarily abstract. It's also large! For many years my smallest paintings were 4'x6'. Most were 6'x8'. But it's been awhile since I've worked at that large size.

As I've investigated art based on birds, or earlier insects, it made more sense to start small. I was unfamiliar with both birds and insects. If I'd started working large I would have ended up with gross, untruthful, and dull generalizations. Working small has forced me to look more closely at both(the insects very closely since they were drawn under a microscope).

BUT, every once in while it can drive me nuts. I think the recent detailed watercolor pencil work pushed me to the brink. I needed the freedom of something less constricting. So today I went back to straight watercolor.



The sketch at top is a quick sketch, with a few color notes, that I did just for practice. The second version is on watercolor paper rather than sketch paper. The birds are Laughing Gulls, seen in April, 2009 just as they made their arrival in Cape May, NJ. Though they'll eventually be on every lamp post in the area, at this time they were in one of the ponds at 'The Meadows,' a great area owned by The Nature Conservancy.

I'm not big on scenic photos or paintings. But sunrise or sunset here always changes my mind. The light and color are just too beautiful.



In this case the sunset which is in back of me as I took the photo is reflected in the background of the painting, with some of it spilling out onto the gulls and water. It was a stunning sight and made the black and white of the Laughing Gulls particularly striking.

I'm stopping for today, before I do something I regret. Tomorrow I'll probably do at least some more work on it.

I should add that this still isn't a large painting. It's only 7"x10" like many of my recent paintings. It's more the free brushwork that has made it seem 'larger' to me. But it is time to start increasing the size of my watercolors. I do not yet approach them as canvases on which to orchestrate color, value, texture and light as I always did with abstract art. I'm very much missing that type of painting.