David O'Hara

This morning’s bird. My daughter bought me a set of Daniel Smith watercolors for Christmas — a far nicer paint set than I’d have bought for myself — and today is my first time using it. Such vivid colors!

Chipping sparrow (Spizzella passerina). One of the many birds I have photographed in my garden.

Side note about the garden: it’s a place where I’ve been intentional about creating habitat and growing native perennial plants. So much urban and suburban landscaping is a food desert for birds. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Killdeer. Finishing my day with another bird from our campus. Two different sketches from the same photo.

Last weekend I took a group of high school students for a nature walk through one of our state parks. I pointed out birds as we walked along, and shared my binoculars for the ones in the distance. Several times I took out my sketchbook to allow the students to see some of the birds I had sketched in that park “up close.”

One of the students said she was no good at drawing, that she had tried and failed. I let her know I did not learn how to draw birds until I was 55.

“You’re over fifty?” She asked, with astonishment. Yes, and I’m still learning, I replied. Don’t give up.

“How do you learn to draw birds?”

It helps to have a good teacher, of course, but it also helps if you allow yourself to mess up and keep trying.

In other words, the way you learn to draw the birds is one bird at a time.

Here is this morning’s bird, a Cooper’s hawk (a juvenile, I think) that landed on a trellis in my garden seven years ago.

It’s not a perfect bird sketch, but it is good practice for the next one, and it’s the best Cooper’s hawk I’ve drawn.

Pencil sketch with violet pencil on toned paper; pigma ink 005 marker for outline; watercolor paint.

If you want to buy some cool, easy to carry watercolor supplies, check out arttoolkit.com. They’re a business I am happy to buy from.

Long-billed curlew.

This one was from a grainy photo taken at long distance in poor light.

It was still fun to see the bird, wading in tall grass growing in a bison wallow.

Wilson’s Phalarope - one of my morning sketches.

One day in 2020 a friend who had spoken in my classes a few times was showing me around his bison ranch. He’s an avid birder and within twenty minutes he introduced me to three “lifers,” birds I had never seen in the wild before.

And he pointed out that the bison create habitat for other animals, including wetlands that allow birds like the phalarope to live in an otherwise semi arid part of our state.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore have both written, “All flourishing is mutual.”

Bicycles.

This is another aspect of the wild life of my state.

Pringle, South Dakota.

Slowly working through the fauna of my state, and as I sketch each one I am trying to look more closely.

This is from a photo I took six years ago in the Paha Sapa or Black Hills of South Dakota. Every time I am there I love to wander around and see the bison, elk, mule deer, pronghorns, goats, sheep, and other residents of that beautiful part of our state.

I keep looking for mountain lions but have yet to see one in this state other than on camera traps. But I walk around looking, camera at the ready.

A few more bird sketches to round out the day. Spent part of my morning at Good Earth State Park near Sioux Falls, taking photos of birds and stopping to sketch them as well. Tonight I worked through these sketches of several downy woodpeckers I saw today. The challenge for me is to draw enough but not too much detail. I’m always happy when I sketch it and then take a photo and the AI recognizes the species from my sketch.

Each sketch is practice for the next one. None of them are perfect, each of them is a small improvement.

Not always an improvement in art. I am not an artist, at least not professionally.

But each sketch is an improvement in observation, in seeing what is there, in beholding the chickadee.

I keep trying to practice what my colleague and friend Scott Parsons taught me years ago:

“Sketch what you see, not what you think you see.”

The difference between those two is often far greater than we allow ourselves to admit.

Sketching birds is one way to expose ourselves to our tendency to give more credence to what we think we see or to what we want to see than to what actually presents itself to us in the world.

Next week I will be leading an online discussion of Plato’s Symposium.

I had this planned for several months. Didn’t expect the Texas legislature to make it so timely!

In an age when it is easy to make art digitally or mechanically, I am making more art than before manually.

And while my art is not great (I harbor no illusions about being remembered as a great artist) I believe that one of the best reasons for making art is not what happens to the past when my paintbrush makes its marks there, or what happens to the air when my stringed instruments cause it to vibrate.

No, the biggest change is what happens in me. The painting changes how I see the world, and opens up new channels of love and empathy.

The art changes me.

I fear that having taken up sketching and watercolor painting I might soon find myself making woodcuts and prints.

I started off in the arts innocently, with music and prose. Music theory seemed a bulwark against anything too squishy.

I admit I slipped into poetry for a few decades, but I meant well. (I still dabble, but I can quit anytime I want.)

Then I found sketchbooks and watercolor paint. It seemed so innocent. So help me, I never meant to spend this much on pens.

I hope this never winds up in acrylics.

Little by little my students and I are trying to turn our university campus into a living laboratory.

arcg.is/941Cm

Something I wrote recently about how important it is to treat others justly when we are in power.

I have been leading a discussion on the Peloponnesian War for several years now. Here is a tidbit from that:

open.substack.com/pub/david…

I publish in a lot of places and don’t always remember to cross-post. Apologies for that.

This morning’s bird.

Early this morning I dropped off a colleague at the airport. He’s about to teach a watercolor painting class abroad with a bunch of our students.

Before leaving my house to pick him up I decided to do a quick sketch of a bald eagle I saw down by the river in Sioux Falls a few days ago.

Pencil sketch for volume and shape, fudenosuke pen for darker outline, Tombow brush pens for color and shading.

Letting my day begin with wonder.

When I’m not teaching, I’m trying to learn more.

When I am learning, I’m becoming a better teacher.

And I’m learning for its own sake, which is a good and joyful thing.

Studies in a red-breasted nuthatch that visited our home last month. I began with an impression in watercolor to get a sense of volume and value and color. Then a more detailed sketch with color to consider the structure of the bird, its posture, and its behavior.

Then the questions that arose from observation and that lead to wonder.

“The love of wisdom begins in wonder.” —Aristotle

Morning practice. Little by little I’d like to sketch and paint all the wildlife on my university campus. Most of it goes unnoticed, even the large animals like deer and turkeys that sometimes wander through at night.

Watercolors are fairly new to me and I’m having fun exploring how to use them to express volume and gesture and shape with a minimum of color and of brushstrokes. Such a meditative practice.

This morning my wife pointed out a belted kingfisher down by the river. It was perched over one of the few places where the water is not covered with ice. I snapped a few photos, then inched closer, snapped a few more photos, and moved closer again. Now at home I’m studying the kingfisher in a way I have never been able to do when watching them in the wild. They tend to be elusive, and to move away fast when I approach. Here are three studies I’ve done today, in different media: ink, watercolor, and pencil.

The most vibrant one, done in colored pencil, is in the book I am handwriting for my infant grandson.

Kingfisher.

We saw this on our walk down by the river this morning. There is not a lot of open water, so it sat still for a long time over a place where the water was not frozen, giving me time to approach slowly for photos. Normally they’re not this willing to put up with company.

I read the morning news during breakfast, and I read some of what St John wrote on Patmos after that.

And then I spent time journaling, which feels very small but also very important.

And after writing five or six pages, I found myself thinking of the cardinal I saw in a small tree yesterday down by the river, puffed up against the cold, and placidly meeting my gaze as I stood on the trail ten feet away.

So I decided to end my journal entry with a sketch of that cardinal, with its calm gaze and its small part of the world. And now as I post this here I am thinking of Wendell Berry’s wise poem, The Peace of Wild Things.