Painting The Bird With Bling

Painted bunting. What do you wear with that color combo?

Pine warblers aside (and mine is getting all porky on his daily diet of suet) my top dollar backyard bird has got to be the the Painted bunting, a certified tropical with temperate zone breeding habits. Gotta love a bird that color-clashes with everything. It’s a twanger in the eye-candy department, the visual equivalent of Frank Zappa playing Bach on the banjo while riding a costumed alpaca. You’ll do a double-take when you see it.

 

It’s also a summer bird in the northern hemisphere (meaning my backyard) and it is, ahem, currently winter here. I’ve been asked to paint another cover for Bird Watcher’s Digest (May/June issue) and this is the way things work in the publishing world- you work months ahead of time. I’ve been doing this forever, always working on Christmas stuff in July, trying to get in the holiday mood when I’d rather go swimming. The subject of this cover is the very summery Painted bunting, and it’s terribly out of season for it.

How nice it is to have a pile of sketchbooks with assorted drawings to choose from. How unfortunate that there is no living habitat to work from outside where the temperature is below freezing. How nice it is to have photos of my beloved garden to work with. (I heard Monet had a staff to tend his waterlilies. That’s so unfair).

my fave rave daylily, but a bit much, don’t you think?

Usually I paint something and then wrack my brains to think up a title when I’m done. This time, however, I did it the other way around and came up with the title first. It’s a nice title: Up Jumped Summer (stolen from the Herbie Hancock tune, Up Jumped Spring) It conjures up a lot of images for me, and I’ve been playing around with three in particular. One is of the bird perched on the stem of a violently red daylily (remember how I said this bird clashes with everything?) I had to drop the red daylily due to a dogfight between bird and flower-  I even tried a rough version of it with the daylily faded back and I liked it well enough but it didn’t really scream loud enough to fit the vision, or the title.

… another of the bunting perched amid the sun-drenched leaves of a brilliant yellow and red canna (more successful).

I love this light!

and finally, one with the bunting scouting around in my Romano pole-beans, a slightly more prosaic approach but one that’s  kinder on the eyes, and one that speaks of the humble need to eat that connects us all. I’m leaning in the latter direction.

Back to Reality, Whatever That Means

American goldfinch, eating sunflower seeds on the hoof

What do you do when you have a galleryful of artwork up for sale? Do more artwork!

As a kind of warmup for the next batch o’ art, I’m out in the garden with binoculars and a scope, sketching the birdies. Don’t know exactly what I’ll do with the drawings, but one never knows, and it’s good to keep your hands busy and your mind engaged. In this hot dry weather  (summer arrived last week and someone shut off the rain  and turned the heat up) the pond and waterfall is highly attractive to a lot of wildlife, as is the fruiting pear tree which is ringing the dinner bell for all sorts of omnivores and frugivores. There’s a lovely lady coyote, very pregnant, who’s been coming out in early evenings to pick up fallen fruit and devour it on the lawn. I wish her and her soon-to-be pups well. She’s an enchanting creature, in a thin summer coat, with an elegant long nose and wise, angled eyes in a sensitive face. And I’m keeping the cat indoors anyway.

Red-bellied Woodpecker, drawn through the scope.

How I Killed the Lawn Tractor

I am the kiss of death for anything mechanical. Put in in my hands and if it’s got moving parts I’ll break it. Tonight I was the grim reaper, ironically enough, for the lawn-tractor. The poor thing now sits in grass high above its fenders, waiting for Sears to come out here and resurrect it.