Birds have long been the artist’s feathered muses: from the era of cave painting to John J. Audubon and beyond. But why birds? Why not snails, cork, or step ladders? Perhaps artists love birds because artistic inspiration can be difficult to come by, and the beautiful things of the natural world, such as birds, flowers, and landscapes, offer the artist a multitude of perspectives and subjects. A parrot ground-feeding in the early daylight is going to possess a different appearance than the same parrot taking a midday nap in the sun. Each movement, each flit of the wing or angle of the head, gives the artist a new subject. Luckily, too, for avian artists, there’s a built-in audience for bird paintings—bird enthusiasts, aviculturists, and novices alike can appreciate a well rendered budgie or macaw.

Here are the portraits of three well-known contemporary avian artists. These artists are working and exhibiting currently, and their works are becoming more sought after year after year.

Eric Peake

Peake, a self-taught artist from Great Britain, has been painting birds since 1976, when he melded his love for birds with his love for painting. His style is realistic ornithological fine art, done in highly detailed transparent watercolor. He paints all types of birds, but specializes in parrots, completing around 26-30 original pieces per year.

In early childhood, Peake became enamored with birds after having been exposed to his grandfather’s and father’s bird keeping hobby. He keeps the family tradition alive by breeding English exhibition budgerigars, a species with which he has a long history. He illustrated both the US and the UK the standard, and is an active member of several budgie societies, as well as several general bird clubs and organizations.

Along with his budgies, Peake currently has a large planted aviary housing Asiatic softbills, and has had grass parakeets and other small parrots, including cockatiels, doves, fan-tail pigeons and pheasants in the past. The love of birds that began in early childhood has now become a fulltime profession.

“When I was very small, about four years old, I painted garden birds. Then I painted a canary when I was five,” said Peake. “I started as a child, and I carried on painting, became professional when I was 35, and have been doing it for 25 years. Birds are fascinating creatures.”

“The creation from a blank piece of paper enables me to see life progress,” continued Peake. “I am able to create an image of a living thing with the use of paint, brush and paper. When beginning a painting, I start with the eye first. This gives life to my subject. In fact, it seems to ask me to complete the rest of the bird. It is not just about painting. To put on paper what I see and feel about birds takes a very special love and bond with the subject. Even the dullest of birds merits a position in the art world. The freedom of being an artist gives me license to produce my own interpretation of what I see and how I feel about it.”

Peake’s bird art his been displayed at many prominent galleries, both in the US and the UK. He lectures around the world on the topic of birds, primarily on the theme of “extinction is forever,” at conferences held by organizations such as the AFA, The Gabriel Foundation (where he was voted the best speaker), PEAC, and The United Kingdom Parrot Conference, which he founded and organized.

Due to the success of his art, Peake is able to contribute to bird organizations. He is distressed about the plight of parrots today, and uses his art and the money it generates to help them. He painted Spix’s Macaw and Young, the proceeds of which were donated to help the Spix’s Macaw Recovery Project. His work has supported organizations such as R.S.P.B.; W.W.F.; World Parrot Trust; Parrot Fund International; Loro Parque Foundation; Tenerife, Spain; Gabriel Foundation, Colorado, USA; S.A.P., Germany; various zoos including Chester and Welsh Mountain Zoo; the Scarlet Macaw Project in Guatemala; the Buffon’s Macaw Project in Costa Rica; and Universities at Liverpool, England, Georgia, USA and Swansea, S.Wales.

“Prior to 1983, my concentration was on all varieties of birds,” said Peake. “In 1983, I read the report about the plight of the Spix's Macaw, which was doomed for extinction, and how other members of the parrot family may follow suit. I decided to look into this more thoroughly, and from 1984 until the present day, I have concentrated on parrots in my art work, as well as lecturing and fund raising.”

In 1989 Peake was commissioned to paint a pair of Princess of Wales parrots for H.R.H. Princess of Wales, Princess Diana, and in 1996, he was named the exclusive artist for the Hotel Botanico (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, one of the prestigiously named top 100 hotels in the world) when 900 of his limited edition prints were purchased and hung for the Hotel’s Grand Opening for the King and Queen of Spain.

“Although I am indeed grateful for the recognition of my work through all of the honors and awards I have received, this has really no bearing on the way I paint,” said Peake. “I paint because it was a God given gift. I paint birds because they are my first love. Birds bring me great pleasure both in the wild and captivity. The creation of a bird on paper brings to life a subject that is dear to my heart. Painting birds has given me a good life, providing me with plenty of opportunity to visit places I would never have dreamed of. That is why I do all I can to raise money for avian projects. Winning an award or honor naturally is uplifting. If anything, it only encourages me to work harder.”

You can find Peake’s artwork at http://www3.upatsix.com/gallery/peake/

Gamini Ratnavira

Gamini Ratnavira is also a self-taught avian artist. Originally from Sri Lanka, Ratnavira uses his memory and life experience to render the images of rain forest birds and mammals onto the canvas. He is a world renowned contemporary wildlife artist whose style, modern re-emergent realism, allows him to capture the birds and the flora he loved as a child.
“I started when I was five years old,” said Ratnavira. “I scribbled my memories into the back of my exercise books. It didn’t look like anything back then, but I wanted to share my experiences. It was very frustrating because I had no formal education in the subject, neither painting nor nature itself. Coming from a third world county, there wasn’t time for that. Nature was my teacher. I learned how to paint from actually being with nature. I tried to recreate what I saw out there.”

Ratnavira has traveled to over thrity-six countries to depict the endangered species throughout the world. He has been heavily involved with Birdlife International, World Bird Sanctuary, the Peregrine Foundation, Fallbrook Land Conservancy, and he is a commercial member of the AFA (American Federation of Aviculture), the Rainforest Foundation, and the Tapir Society, among others. He has led bird watching tours to Peru and Sri Lanka, and his life list is a remarkable 4,000+ wild bird sightings. He has illustrated bird plates for both the Field Guide to the Birds of Peru and Field Guide to Sri Lanka.

Ratnavira had a remarkable entry into his love of painting, simply by watching water collect in a leaf. “One day I was looking at the rain in Sri Lanka and the drops of water were falling on a leaf of elephant’s ear and collected in it,” said Ratnavira. “I could see the whole environment reflected in the water, and I decided then to choose nature as my teacher, because it is perfect. Sometimes when I paint I want to create the moisture, let’s say, in a cloud forest, and the only way you can do that is to be in the environment where that occurs. I was lucky enough to be born in a place where there are a lot of these kinds of environments.”
Water remains important to this artist, who uses it as a significant part of the creative process. “Once, I was frustrated doing a painting of hornbills. The background was so detailed and I couldn’t push it away from the birds because both were very detailed. I took an air brush and filled it up with water and sprayed it over the background and it diffused.”

Artists usually paint what they know and love, and Ratnavira is no exception. He once had more than six hundred birds, including parakeets, Asian ringneck parakeets, Australian parrots, lories, neophemas, hanging parrots, over one hundred species of finches, pheasants, ducks, migratory birds, and birds of prey, all of which were subjects for his painting. He also holds the first breeding record of greenwinged macaws in Asia, and was a chief advisor to the Sri Lanka Zoo.

“I like to call myself an environmentalist as well as an artist. I try to create a painting as artistically as possible. I don’t want it to be just an illustration in a book. I want to create a view from a window. In order to capture the character of the bird you have to really get into the detail. If you want to paint a macaw there is a lot of expression in the face, and that is created by the detail. Like with a greenwinged macaw, the face changes with mood. I consider these things.”

Ratnavira used to paint two to three hundred paintings a year, but now he does half that many. He is most known for his renderings of tropical birds, which he finds a challenging and motivating subject. “I see a lot of beautiful painting done by a lot of people, but recreating the character of a particular bird is more personally challenging,” said Ratnavira. “The softness of the feathers is challenging too. The only way to recreate that is to get to know the bird and the structure and the color of feathers. The intermingling of the colors of a feather is something not a lot of people think about. The hyacinth macaw is particularly challenging. There is no real blue in the feathers. I recreate the color by understanding the making the feather itself. It’s like a scientific study. Once you know which feather goes where, it’s like putting a puzzle together.”

You can see Gamini Ratnavira’s work at http://www.gaminiratnavira.com.

Tony Sánchez

Tony Sánchez is also a self-taught avian painter, from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Sánchez holds advanced studies in veterinary medicine, but abandoned it because he began to draw scientific illustrations and chose to focus on his drawing instead. He says that his work as a scientific illustrator prepared him well to become a wildlife artist, a vocation he is passionate about. His technique is realistic, though he does add some impressionistic touches to the backgrounds of some of his oil paintings.

Sánchez has exhibited his paintings in the United States at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California, among many other places. He has also shown in Europe in group or solo (monographic) exhibitions. His works have appeared in various books, magazines, and CD-ROMs, and he has recently finished a book about the birds of the Canary Islands that will be published in Spain. Sánchez belongs to many bird organizations, and works with them to generate funds for bird causes.

Like the other two artists, Sánchez became infatuated with birds at a young age. “In all my life, I always remember a special love for birds,” said Sánchez. “My father had a large collection of canaries and other birds and I always had all kinds of animals when I was a boy. At this moment, however, I don’t have time to have my own birds. My artistic profession takes a lot of time, but I like to visit the collections of place that have large parrots, such as Loro Parque, Palmitos Park, and so on. Also, I am an ornithologist and I like to visit different places to observe birds in the wild. I need to observe birds—they, together with the art, are part important of my life. I can pass hours and hours looking the same bird without becoming tired.”

This careful observation, combined with a love of birds, makes Sánchez a dedicated artist, sometimes completing three hundred paintings in a year, if a commission calls for it. Observation is the key to getting to know a subject, said Sánchez, who studies his subjects carefully before he paints them.

“You need to observe the bird as much time as you can to get to know all of the aspects about its character and postures,” said Sánchez. “In the case that a bird artist wishes to represent the habitat of a bird, he must visit its habitat where the bird lives or study some aspect of the biology of the bird that he wishes to paint, so that he can add different elements, such as plants or insects, and avoid any scientific mistakes. Although, in my opinion, every artist is totally free to represent what they wish, without any kind of limits.”

Sánchez likes to paint parrots, especially, though he is also fond of the birds of North America and Europe. He takes on commissions for portraits, but will only accept if the bird symbolizes something about the person, for example, an eagle symbolizing power, or if it is the person’s favorite bird.

You can take a look at the art of Tony Sánchez at http://www.tonysanchezart.com