The Starling that became a Quail
A painting demo at the North Shore Artists Guild (NSAG)
Back in the Spring of this year, the North Shore Artists Guild invited me to demonstrate my Wild Bird painting process to their membership. Their November meeting happened to fall on the evening before my Hidden Worlds exhibition was installed at the Foyer Gallery in Squamish. It was with a mix of celebration and nervous anticipation that I spoke to the group of around 83 artists.
I had an hour to describe my intentions with this series, create an energetic background and block in the beginnings of a bird.
Starling beginnings, with silhouette, drawing and framing device.
I started with a bit of the background on how I started painting birds back in about 2019.
It was a departure from the work I had been doing up to that point - i.e painting landscape in watercolour on paper. Anyone who works on paper, shares similar challenges when it comes to exhibiting their work. We are faced with framing the pieces under glass, which is expensive and many galleries see it as more of a liability for shipping than canvas. Potential buyers can be put off by a clean, gallery presentation frame and prefer to choose their own mattes and frames. Scaling up is also problematic with water-media paintings - paper is not only expensive, but harder to find in these times of supply-induced scarcity.
I felt I really needed to get to grips with acrylics and I needed a different theme to take me there.
Painting birds was refreshing and gave me an opportunity to use colour that we don't necessarily see in nature here on the Pacific Coast. My process is a combination of direct, intuitive mark-making on the one hand and controlled painting on the other. I try to start the backgrounds as soon after walking in the woods or at the Squamish Estuary as possible and without too many preconceptions. I talk on my website about channeling the elements of Nature, the things you sense as well as see while out walking; the sounds of wind, the effects of light and seasons changing, movement of tides etc - it’s that energy that I'm trying to capture in the backgrounds. Then I start incorporating the bird as it emerges or disappears into the background. Birds and their environment are integral to each other in my paintings.
For the demo I had 3 elements in mind - the European starling, murmuration and dusk.
As I worked on the background, someone in the audience pointed out an alternative bird to the Starling, which reminded me of how these paintings started back in 2019. A bird would reveal itself to me out of the gestures and directions of the mark-making. As a group, we visualized a grouse or a Quail, probably quite differently, but the bird had revealed itself!
While this demo background was drying, I explained how I go about integrating the bird. I like to get really familiar with the anatomy, the distinctive shapes of features like the beak, the eyes and the hierarchy of feather patterns. An iconic pose in silhouette helps me compose the image and I demonstrated this using a background I had pre-prepared. The resulting Starling painting is shown below - I cropped it to 12”x12” and mounted the paper on primed birch panel.
The mystery Quail
Back in the studio, I got to work finding this mystery Quail and loved the surprise element that had come out of the demo session.
In the spirit of the concepts I was demonstrating that evening, I‘ve left a lot of ‘Lost and Found’ discoveries and surprise elements for the viewer.
Here it is - the California Quail 18”x14” Fluid acrylic on paper, mounted to primed, birch panel.
The background demo that suggested —— and became, a California Quail!
The original Starling
European Starling 12”x12”
Fluid acrylic painting on paper, mounted on primed, birch panel.