Shared Interests: White-breasted Nuthatch and Downy Woodpecker Watercolor and Time-lapse Video

I’m not much for imaginative names for paintings. I tend to go for the obvious. Most often I only have one species in a painting, which helps simplify things. This painting ended up having two species, which would’ve made the name too long. In general I think titling paintings can become ridiculous. A title makes it handy to identify a painting within a body of a work, but it really has no impact on the painting itself. Occasionally the title provides a frame of mind to view the painting in and may provide some insight into what the artist intended. It makes more sense for abstract paintings. A good example is I Saw the Figure Five in Gold by Charles Demuth, which references the poem The Great Figure, by his friend William Carlos Williams. In this case, knowing what he was inspired by raises an already great painting to an even higher level.

In most cases I’m under the suspicion that artists  give extraordinary names to “under-ordinary” works to compensate a bit. In an art school painting class, I remember a student saying with dramatic flair before his final project was critiqued, “I call this piece Oppression.” His project was an installation-ish piece which had a barbecue grill in front of a tarp that was lightly splattered with paint. Some paint-covered rags lay around it, and several Krylon spray painted corn cobs were plopped randomly on the grill. The professor said, “Yeah… I don’t really care what you call it. It shouldn’t matter. A piece should stand on its own.” He paused a few LONG minutes while looking at it and then said, “This is supposed to be a final project for a painting class. I don’t see a lot of paint here.” I can’t imagine that the student got a good grade. Maybe he should’ve called it Bar-B-Q?

We often have birds jockeying for position at our feeders, especially the suet feeders, which I make out of hollowed out logs like the one in the painting. It isn’t unusual to see birds fighting over one of the logs. Nuthatches put up a great show, at times flaring out their feathers to look bigger and flipping their heads from side to side like a cobra. My initial thought was to call this The Standoff but thought I’d go with Shared Interests, since they don’t seem overly aggressive with each other. But the name really shouldn’t matter…

I started this painting planning to hold back on the palette, the contrast and the saturation. I wanted a soft background that was still “washy.” I tend to use a lot of saturated color and a wide palette, so this involved working out of my comfort zone a bit. As the painting went along, I did boost the saturation in the reds and shadows, but I think that on the whole I was able to restrain myself. I bragged up the colors in the log a lot but kept them all in the same basic color scheme, so I’m happy with the result.

The original painting is available in my Etsy shop… have a peek!