Violet Blackbirds

From Birds, magazine of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. August - October 2008.

I do most of my bird watching at work. A s a landscape painter, I cannot really avoid it. My last two shows were based on a single field in north Essex. This field is farmed like a factory: barley, rape, wheat, year on year, so my on-the-job birdwatching is modest, and I can confirm that fields like this do not support a wealth of birdlife. Yet there are birds about, and when I see them I am usually mixing oil paint, trying to paint the place they live in, and I sometimes paint them in too.

My starting point as a painter is that I do not know what is there until I have looked. This goes for everything: colour, shape, texture, scale. But because my paintings are built up from distinct mixes of colour, the most important of these is colour. Every last bit of the landscape has to be converted into a mixof some sort. So, if a bird flies past and I want to include it, the first thing I do is identify and mix its colour. If you know your birds, you might think this should be easy enough. Blackbirds are black, greenfinches green, and blue tits are blue and yellow with bits of black and white.

Well, actually, no. A blue tit can look grey, cream, green or black, or be just
plain invisible. Blackbirds can be violet-grey; greenfinches almost orange. It is
a point most painters understand, but do all birdwatchers? And, if you are not
sure about it, is it possible you are missing other things about colour in nature?

I think we have to look because there really is nothing quite like xperience. As a painter, I am partisan. I think painting can help us notice things in a unique way, that can help us see birds, you might say, in a different light. Landscape painting is a way of representing a visual environment. If I see a bird, I am very aware that its colour exists inside the colours of the environment around it. This might sound an odd way to put it, but consider how colours in a painting are accumulated.

A colour in a painting is like a note on a stave. It has no value except in relation to the other notes. Its character and expression come by comparison
with all the notes around it. Painters sometimes talk about trying to paint in
key, so the black of a blackbird on a branch in daylight might have to be
compared with the colour of oak bark in shadow directly behind it. This could
mean comparing a violet-grey (the bird) with a black-brown (the bark). Assess
these colours one against the other, mix them, and they will both be in key.
They will look right partly because you have taken into account what are
called effects of simultaneous contrast. The darker tone will have made the
lighter tone look lighter, and the warmer colour made the cool colour look
cooler. By capturing this, you will correctly paint a violet blackbird, and it will
look just right, unlike a black blackbird.

So, a bird in a landscape is like a note in a piece of music. The same bird
flying through a different landscape will be part of a different piece of visual
music. Its colour will be different, and if you are trying to paint it you will have to
mix a new colour by comparing it with other new colours. Not surprisingly,
observational painting can make you think about why colour perception is so
unstable. And it certainly makes you take with a pinch of salt the idea that a
blackbird is always, at all times, black!

Another reason why colour shifts is that illumination changes. And there’s
much more to illumination than just the brightness of things in or out of the
sun. Different kinds of illumination fall on objects: there are many kinds of
direct light and an incredibly rich array of reflected lights from every direction,
each with its own distinctive colour. Outdoors, there is direct moonlight,
reflected light from water and rock, transmitted light through leaves . . .
Each of these lights will change the appearance of object colours. For
example, green light under trees makes green leaves look even greener but
pink bark browner. Direct light passing between leaves introduces a yellower
light, and there will be reflected lights everywhere. Inside an oak canopy, it is
quite possible for the yellow on a blue tit to look green, so a predator with
colour vision would have less chance of seeing it.

The colours we see on a bird, then, carry information about illumination.
With practice, a painter can paint the colours of objects combined with the
colour of the light falling upon them. By careful mixing you can build in
common colour components of the illumination, so the painting will have
something of the natural light you see. Painters that love the light of nature
try to do this all the time. It is a challenge. It is a particular challenge because
you can never predict what the combinations of colour and light in the natural
world will actually look like.

But, you may be thinking, birdwatchers use images that predict bird colour
all the time, after all, that is what traditional field guides are, page after page
of predictive pictures. So it is all very well for a painter to go on about shifting keys and lights, but if bird colour in the landscape varies so much, How do field guide painters select their colours? And why do painted field guides work?

Since the earliest illustrators, artists whose main interest was identification
have tried to neutralise effects of illumination by concentrating on what are
sometimes called local colours. Perhaps the best way to do this is to work from a dead or stuffed bird in fairly neutral light, such as you get from daylight
through a north facing window in a traditional studio. It can also be useful to
have some kind of white sheet in view as a neutral reference. Colours for the
different parts of the bird are then mixed by comparing each colour with other
colours on the bird, without looking at anything in the immediate
environment that could affect the perception, except perhaps the white. In this way, it is possible to paint groups of colours that will more or less describe the
pigmentation of an individual bird. It is the way that Audubon worked, for
example, after he had shot his specimens and taken them indoors.
Most field guide illustrators are interested in visual classification by order,
family, genus and species. This means the colours of a bird on the painters
table may have to be compared with the colours of a very similar bird, which
at first glance looks identical. For example, is the brown on the back of a
common sandpiper lighter or darker than the brown on the back of a spotted
sandpiper? Do artists for such guides have a pile of sandpipers in all their
plumages (eight) in the studio? Or all the British gulls? (Sixty-seven if you
count summer, winter, adult and juvenile plumages.)

I asked some specialist bird artists about this. It turned out that, yes, many
field guides have been made using the many skins, bird skins mounted on
a stick and stretched out, that are available. The national collection is held at
Tring, and there, professional illustrators can compare and paint sandpipers
and gulls in a way that will minimise effects of context and lighting by taking
out the coloured illumination, contrast effects and light and shade of the real
world outside. The birdwatcher using such a guide has a basic colour chart for his birds, but should be aware that they will be subject to continually
varying effects.

It is worth realising just how carefully each bird has to be compared with
the next. Alan Harris, responsible for many excellent pages in my own more
traditional field guide, gave me an idea of this when told me of a plate of
sparrows. He had made painted notes for the page from skins in a museum,
but when he came to use the notes in the studio he made the first bird slightly
too dark. Correctly comparing one sparrow with the next, by the time he got
to the darkest one it was so dark it looked like a different species. He had to
change them all.

This kind of attention is necessary to distinguish different species, and I
love the kind of illustration it produces. What strikes me about the colour is its
lack of daylight and its slightly fixed look. But I do not think this is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. The birds look like what they are intended to be: sets of
attractive coloured shapes to be read relative to one another in an ideal world
of pages: family, genus, species. What is more, in spite of their contrivance, I
usually find the colours perfectly useful.

As readers of Birds will know, identification is rarely made by colour alone.
Shape, flight, call, behaviour and location all play a part; and the more
experience you have the more these begin to work together. Because natures
colour changes all the time, we cannot expect exact matches between the colour on the page and the bird in the field. For identification, colours in a field guide
are just another clue. And because the artist has skilfully removed illumination
and contrast effects, and set them out in ranks on a plain page, these birds
do not claim to look particularly real. This lets in other things.

You see small changes as part of a taxonomic scheme, so you see a big
idea alongside the individual. And there is an important other side to this.
Because these little pictures do not try to look like experiences, you could say
that they leave you exposed to experience. They do not confuse the issue. They complement your thoughts about looking; they do not claim to look for you.

Of course there is plenty of room for other kinds of bird illustration, and
very useful too. Photography, in particular, plays a major role in modern field
guides. Photographs are now probably the commonest form of imagery on
the planet. So how useful is photographic colour in a field guide?

Artists such as Stephen Taylor strive to capture the changing
effects of light and circumstance. Alan Harris, when illustrating a
field guide or technical publication, tries to eliminate them, so
that accurate comparisons can be made: in this case (below right)
between various races and ages of skylarks (from The Skylark, by
Paul Donald, courtesy of A & C Black). Photographs of skylarks,
all of the same race, show how such comparisons would be
much more difficult photographically as the intensity of hue and
pattern can be so strongly influenced by external factors.

In everyday English photographic still suggests accuracy. But accurate colour may not identify a bird. The colours captured by modern digital cameras can be very accurate indeed, but they will show just how variabl colours in the outdoors are. It can be impossible to make a positive identification from a single photograph, which is why guide books often show several images of the same species in different conditions. Some websites show many shots of a single bird for the same reason. Which brings us back to violet blackbirds and orange greenfinches. Photographs incorporate the illlumination effects that traditional illustrators seek to eliminate. They also show contrast effects with the environment: a reed warbler against green reeds will look reddish and in evening light, redder still.

The field guide designer has to find typical images, which can be very
difficult with a camera. Wildlife artist Robert Gillmor put it to me this way:

The photographers bird is an individual. It might be seedy that day. It might be
being blown about. It could be between plumages, or making odd
movements; and as for the lighting! Two photographers photographing the
same bird in the same minute will produce two different coloured birds.

Photographs are clearly a wonderful way to show new aspects of birdlife.
But I think they should come with a health warning: To be taken in
moderation. For identification, the more individually perfect the photograph,
the less it will look like the particular bird you are looking at: the photographers bird is an individual, as is yours.

And all this super real digital impact is seductive. It can tease us into
feeling the image is something it can never be: a real experience: which is
probably the source of the oddity that I find with bird guide photography.
Those little ersatz patches of reality are so very unlike the all-surrounding,
shifting, visually messy experience of nature. And I personally think they can
get in the way.

Do not get me wrong. Used well, photography can reveal things. It can open
eyes and minds. Photography can be both useful information and excellent
art. But it is precisely because digital imagery is now so good that the
production values can mislead. No, it is not a bird, it is pixels. It’s a mechanical reproduction. The experience of nature cannot be confined to screen or print. Birdwatchers and landscape painters spend a lot of time outdoors, and
experience helps. Over the past few years, I have met some expert birdwatchers, including a few serious twitchers, and in spite of awesome optics, pagers and
almost publishable notebooks, I have still not met the caricature tick-list anorak. As a painter, what strikes me about expert birders is not so much the checklist as their openness to the natural world, especially their sense of how
everything they see is somehow provisional.

Identification can be a delicate business. Which way is the wind blowing?
What are the odds in this sort of ground cover? Maybe it is a late moult? Would you see two together? Is that a blue-green or a blue-grey? The idea that nature
is changeable and unpredictable is built in to the way expert birdwatchers see.
It could be this, it could be that. And sometimes you just cannot tell at all.
Acquired knowledge of appearance and behaviour, of predictability, is used
outdoors to interpret the unpredictable. And the sheer trickiness of seeing
nature is surely part of the fascination.

Landscape painting teaches you that nature is elusive. Possibly only
painters know just how much acquired knowledge and technique goes into
making a picture out of a few moments of experience. And in my view, the
best observational painting gives us a sense of having caught something, so
to speak, on the wing.

To do this you have to have a sense of the painting being made, to be
reminded that the paint on the surface, though finished, emerged, and that
the scene, though captured, will change. This is part of the fascination of
painting, and perhaps it is what draws me to add birds to my own pictures.
Seen within a landscape, the shifting colours and shapes of birds seem to me
a perfect metaphor for movement, beauty and not presuming to know.❖

Editor, Rob Hume.

Alan Harris, illustrations of various races and ages of skylarks (from The Skylark, by Paul Donald, courtesy of A & C Black.

Copyright, Stephen Taylor, 2009.