About Me

I began digital painting of birds several years ago when I found myself looking at a huge library of over a thousand hours of video footage that was sitting in boxes and on hard drives. It was all birds. Six hundred species from North America, and hundreds more from elsewhere. In all that were over 100 million individual video frames, bearing uncountable images of birds in every position possible. Why not use them to create stories, just as a videographer does with footage. Painting was the way to go because a painting can say a lot about the world. I started birding at age 9 and bought my first video camera in the 1990s, hoping to capture a nighthawk at the bottom of its dive, something impossible with the cameras of the day. Video added an unimaginable dimension of adventure and in-your-face intimacy to plain old birding. You can see some of the results at https://www.youtube.com/@RavenOnTheMountain Painting from video took me to yet another level, as it is possible to make a scene be what you want, not just what it is. The picture "Morning Hunt" is a good example. The action takes place in my yard several times a year, as we have quail in abundance and Cooper's Hawks often. But getting an adult hawk in a bank, and the quail scattering, all in front of a New Mexico landscape is an image of the mind, one that a lens could only collect in parts. Some stills, a screen, a stylus and some time, however, do it nicely.