Artistic Endeavours
I don’t draw birds to capture their likeness. I draw to get closer to the thing you can’t quite name—the slant of their presence, the small weight of their attention before it lifts.
Every bird carries something distinct—a flicker, a rhythm, a kind of gravity.
Not personality, exactly. But presence. Enough to follow you home.
I work in charcoal, pencil, watercolour, and oils—because no single medium is enough.
I hold a deep love for pencil and watercolour sketches to imbue the energy of the bird.
Oil is for reverence.
I don’t aim for accuracy. I aim for essence.
A tilt of the wing that felt like a question.
A glance that lingered longer than it should have.
The kind of moment that isn’t photographable, but stays anyway.
These drawings aren’t records.
They’re what’s left when something beautiful moves on, and you’re still standing there, grateful.
Dead Duck
Watercolour on cotton, 180 × 125 mm, 2024
This piece draws from a long artistic tradition—Rembrandt, Soutine, and others—where the stillness of death becomes a site of intimacy and reverence. While most of my work is devoted to observing living animals, I’m frequently met with the reality of their absence: carcasses in wetlands, along roadsides, beneath powerlines.
This image is not an elegy, but an observation.
Death, in the context of ecology, is neither rare nor unnatural—it’s part of the data. Understanding mortality is vital to understanding species health.
In painting this duck, I wasn’t interested in dramatising its death. I was interested in stillness. In the weight of it. In the way something so light in life becomes heavy in the hand.
There is a kind of honesty in these encounters.
This work attempts to hold that moment without flinching.
I paint at the speed of a human.
All arrives precisely on time.
Feathers drying on the cotton.