I’m an Easterner so I paint primarily birds of the Eastern US. Doesn’t stop me from looking West for inspiration, though! When Spring migration starts I do look at birder reports all across the US to see how the data points flow North. A few weeks ago I happened to be looking at Southern California and saw several reports of Vermilion Flycatchers in the LA area. Kinda surprising since they tend to stay between Nevada and West Texas. Bang! I have several late 1950’s California maps and a 1959 Los Angeles City map. Time for a Western bird!
While I work I listen to a lot of music, audio books and interviews. I was listening to an older interview with one of my favorite living artists, Tony Fitzpatrick. In the interview he was describing a compass rose tattoo and how it’s a common motif in some of his work. Hmmm, lets look that up. On a whim I decided I needed to use a star for the Flycatcher. When I started to graph it I found it necessary to exaggerate the star in order to accomodate the bird. I also dropped the light/dark pairing that’s part of the compass rose design, otherwise it would make the piece a little busy. I don’t want anything to detract from the star of each piece.
I’m a member of a photo sharing site (pmp-art.com) and the photo this Flycather is based off of is from Rodney Campbell. He’s a wonderful photographer and gracious to share his photos. I’ve got small gallery of my photos on the site and it’s wonderful to see other artists interpretation of these photos. The Vermilion Flycatcher is a bird who’s red is STRONG so it needed STRONG complementary colors to make it POP. My color wheel is never far, I settled on permanent green light, manganese blue hue, cadmium yellow deep hue. This, with the red of the flycatcher, puts it on the complementary tetrad. Strong colors for the Western Star; the Vermilion Flycatcher. The completed piece is 8 X 8.
