Painting in Series: Birds in the Landscape

Crop of an oil painting from this series featuring Brandt's cormorants.

”…birds are the opposite of a landscape view that lays itself out in a kind of horizontal, placid seductiveness. Birds refuse that subjugation.”

Adam Nicolson, Bird School

What do birds have to do with landscape? We may think of birds as creatures of the air, but their connections to the landscape are abundant. From interacting with and influencing their habitat through nesting, migration, and predation; to how their physical presence becomes a part of the landscape we see. Mimicking and morphing into features of the land, they disrupt an otherwise orderly picture. Birds are as much connected to place as we humans are, and to those who pay attention to them, they bring a magical quality to the places they inhabit. This is what I set out to explore with my painting series “Birds in the Landscape: Exploring Coastal Habitats of the Monterey Bay Region”.

Last year when I started working with oil paints, I decided I wanted to create a series of paintings. My aim was to explore the medium for myself and have a fun deep dive into a subject I was interested in. It eventually morphed into this project.

I had attempted to work in series before but always found it difficult. I had all these thoughts and feelings floating around in my brain for so long, inklings of connections I wanted to make with my art but no concrete understanding of how to do that. I’m not sure how or why it suddenly clicked, but I think deciding to just give it a try has allowed me space to develop the skill.

I had a feeling and a few ideas, so I started to work and followed through until it came to life. I didn’t have it all figured out when I started, and it’s still developing as I work. That’s part of the beauty of art in a series, you get to see how the artist develops alongside the project, you see the journey as I explore the subject, and the process becomes part of the end result.

In progress -- one of the paintings from this series.

Landscape in general is very interesting to me, I love learning about the way humans

relate to landscape, change it and are changed by it throughout history. I’m intrigued by the culture and history surrounding British landscapes: ancestral connections to land, folklore, and archeology. There's a real revival movement there around imbuing the natural world with sacredness and spiritual power. To me, this doesn’t go against science, but is a necessary part of humanity’s relationship with the land throughout history. I wanted to explore this same magical feeling of the majesty of the landscape that I live in.

The history of the land I live on and how it was shaped belongs first to the people of the Esselen and Rumsen Ohlone tribes, among others. There are many beautiful generational stories relating land and animals in this place, but it’s not my ancestry to explore in my artwork. So I wanted to find a way that I could explore my personal relationship with this landscape in the here and now. And what connects me to landscape in the here and now is, of course, birds!

In my previous blogs, I’ve talked a lot about how birds bring me into the present moment. They remind me to look around and to engage with the natural world, they help me to remember that life can be lived fully in every moment, and that just being is enough. When I began thinking about this painting series, I started to think about how birds fit into the landscape around me. They aren’t separate entities, they engage with their habitat, change it and are changed by it just the way humans are.

I’ve also mentioned my interest in "in-between" spaces, those liminal zones in nature where habitats transition and birds often thrive, such as the rocky intertidal, sea cliffs, and estuaries. These very specific ecological niches provide key habitats for bird species who are uniquely adapted to live and thrive there. These are the habitats that I want to explore with this painting series, and they also happen to be my favorite landscapes to be in, and the ones I feel the deepest connection to.

Another painting in the series showing shorebirds in the transition time of summer to fall.

Birds themselves change the shape of the landscape, not only in their ecological interactions but also in the way they change our view of the landscape. Their colors, shapes, and movements become a part of the place, a feature of the land. They take a neat and orderly view and add movement and life, breaking up the space. They seem at odds, yet work in concert. I wanted to convey this through my artwork. But how to go about it? First, by creating a set of limitations for myself.

As an artist there are infinite possibilities of things you could create, which can be overwhelming when staring at a blank page or canvas. Creating art within some form of limitations can actually be freeing instead of restricting. Providing myself some parameters helps to define this painting series and give it focus. My chosen parameters for this series are:

• Focus on birds found on the Pacific Coast in the Monterey Bay region, specifically birds in coastal or aquatic habitats

• Exploring one species or migratory grouping per painting (for example: winter shorebirds)

• Each painting focuses on a different habitat

• Some “zoomed in” on birds within the landscape and some "zoomed out" on the larger landscape and the shapes of the birds within it

• Use my own reference photos as much as possible, to tie the paintings in to my own encounters with birds in my local landscapes

• 8-10 finished paintings

Red-winged blackbirds at Carmel River Lagoon. Shapes and colors here exaggerate the feelings.

In general in my work and in this series, I’m more interested in capturing the feeling of the subject than in representing it with perfect accuracy. Paying attention to the shapes is one way that I do this, breaking down complexity into representational forms. Playing with color is another, increasing or decreasing the vibrancy of colors or working with a limited color palette. In some paintings I may tie in the colors of the birds with colors of the landscape. In others, the birds stand out on their own as an element in the landscape.

I’m excited to keep working on this series and to keep sharing it with you. It feels like a coming together of everything that inspires me and what I’ve been working toward as an artist over the last three and a half years. It’s also a very personal series to me, gathering together many of my deepest interests and tying them into a larger creative work.

Next month on the blog: I’ll be talking about how I embrace “slow art” and doing a painting profile on my Cormorants of Point Lobos painting from this series. Blog posts go up twice a month on the second and fourth Saturdays, and the second post of every month for the next several months will be a profile on a painting from Birds in the Landscape.

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All work copyright Morgan Lewis. Written and edited by me, a real human, not AI!