Australian Fairy Wren

Australian Fairy Wren / Oil on black canvas / 5x7 / $68 includes shipping

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I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF an Australian Fairy Wren, but I swear, I did not make it up. I was looking for photos of wrens, and this spectacularly colored turquoise and azure and royal and sapphire blue creature showed up and blew me away. 

Usually, I only paint birds I know. I am comfortable doing that, and it makes me happy. I don't care if I paint 30 cardinals and 50 wrens, 100 chickadees and 500 robins - they are my backyard friends, and their songs, their nests, their flitting selves at my feeders help create the warp and the woof of my days. I could paint them forever, and I probably will. 

People send me bird photos all the time, and I do love looking at them. But most of the exotics that people send (and this is what they send) are beyond my skills, especially if I've never seen them in real life. 

What I like best about the bird paintings, I think, is the character and personality of the birds. Capturing those things, in the tilt of the head or the set of the beak - insouciance, or braggadocio, or jauntiness - or just a little chickadee innocence - this makes me happy. And those things are things I've learned from watching my backyard birds.

But there was something wrenny about the Australian Fairy Wren, and then, there were those colors. My brother once said to me that he thought that if blue didn't exist, I probably wouldn't be able to paint. And he might be right. 

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For Today

"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense."

- Pablo Picasso