Those wild eyes, so knowing, so divine.

Summer is really here now, and early morning at the easel is dappled with warm orange. I haven't finished the lorikeets, though I am soooo close. But like a siren's song, this beautiful creature wouldn't stop speaking to me. And now she will be followed by a whole collection of native raptors in graphite - she pretty much insisted on it. 

Do you know her? She is a white bellied sea eagle - I see her kin soaring high above on occasion. She and her cousins the wedge-tailed eagle are our largest native raptors, and oh, the are resplendent.⁠

Those wild eyes, so knowing, so divine. They talk to the wild in my own heart. Oh to have wings, to soar in thermals, to see so far and wide.  Her feathers that we think of as vibrant white contain a myriad of shadowed gradients, all ruffled and fluffed. Oh to smooth them under hand, to stroke such beauty and remember we are kin.⁠

This process is slow and intentional, tiny strokes of graphite on watercolour paper, slow layering, deep observation, return and add a little more dark, soften, soften, darker still.

23 Dec 2021