I didn’t begin painting birds because I was interested in them.  Like most people, I noted with little interest that there were, in fact, birds around me all the time.  Exposure to the works of Alfred Hitchcock taught me to be appropriately terrified of them.  My family’s annual Thanksgiving meal was my most meaningful interaction with our avian friends.

But birds are irresistible as subjects for drawings and paintings.  Their colors, their structure, their grace, their decided oddness – all these present interesting challenges to an artist.  And, when things come together, the results can be really striking.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve never seen or heard of the flamingo.  Someone describes it to you thus: It’s a neon pink bird that lives in flocks of tens of thousands.  These flocks often move in unison, almost like they’re marching or dancing.  They have long, sinewy necks that allow them to hold their heads upside down underwater when they eat. Their legs appear to bend backward, and they will balance on one leg for hours at a time.

 How could these things possibly be real?  And yet they are, and they are beautiful. Capturing that contrast between the picturesque and the alien is a lot of fun. 

It’s a very different artistic experience than, say, painting a portrait.  There, I’m on familiar ground, fiddling with proportions and placement, but depicting the elements of the human face that I’ve been studying for literally as long as I’ve been alive.  I know how to paint a nose. Painting your specific nose is a difference of a few brushstrokes.

But when I turn my attention to a bird, I’m building an entirely different structure.  New techniques are required – for painting beaks and feathers and talons and capturing something expressive in features that are so different from our own. 

This is the genesis of my fascination with birds.  Once I started looking, I found more and more worth looking at.  Now I don’t just see birds everywhere, I see particular species.  During the winter, I become aware of just how many nests are perched in the trees everywhere I go. 

You can't help but feel closer to them.  I find myself watching seagulls on windy days as they seem to float, stationary, on incoming gusts of wind.  There can be no point to this, it seems to me, except a desire to play.  And watching a tiny plover prancing back and forth to avoid incoming waves reminds me of the day-to-day struggles we all face.

There is a family of cardinals that lives in the trees beyond my back fence.  I see the male nearly every morning, working a circuit around my backyard – first on the fence on the east side, then on the planter, then in that tree on the west side. He is alert and wary.  Often, his mate is flitting from tree to tree, her reddish-brown feathers looking an awful lot like a fur coat.  They’re perhaps the nicest neighbors you could hope for. 

This is one of the great gifts of having a little art in your life.  It makes you stop and really look around.  You might opt to paint something just because it looks spectacular.  But once you’ve spent the required time with your subject, you feel closer to it than ever before.