Just a peep about birds this morning. You already know I like them, because there’s one singing at you every time you come to this website! I thought I would tell you about the inspiration for the ones I have decorating my shelves, and for the ones I love to paint . . . 
they have such interesting details for my tiny brush, beaks, eyes, feet and claws; plus their soft colors and sometimes quizzical expressions; always at their best with musical notes coming out of their mouths. ♥
I’m not the only one who enjoys painting them . . . I look for old bird books while on our travels . . . some of them have beautiful art in them. I found this one in England. ♥
We aren’t the kind of birdwatchers that go out to the woods with binoculars; we don’t have the patience to wait for them to show up. But we have three feeders hanging from the wisteria trellis outside our kitchen windows, and a bird bath sitting a little further out by the picket fence, which means they come to us. Which makes it so very handy for drawing them! Yesterday I removed the screen from one of the windows so I could photograph the feeders with a clear view. The birds did not care for this sudden closeness . . . no matter how stealthily I approached, most of them would all fly off together in a cacophony of wings and indignant peeps. This was the best I could do.
I began feeding birds (and when you feed birds, you automatically feed squirrels because where there is bird seed, there are squirrels) when I moved to the island, noticing and falling in love with all the beautiful nature around me. Seeing a cardinal for the first time was a big part of the inspiration. Where I grew up in southern California and then on the Central Coast, there were no cardinals. Until I moved here, I’d never seen one. It was like magic for me; how could there be such a red bird? I needed to see more of them! They were Christmas come alive. Like valentines in the snow; they’re the only color in the winter when all else is brown, black, gray or white. I now recognize the little twisty noise they make, I often hear them before I see them. And they mate for life; I’ll never forget the first time I saw a brilliant red cardinal come to the feeder, delicately take a sunflower seed, fly with it to a nearby rhododendren where the female was perched, and place it in her beak.
When I bought my first house on the island, there was an ancient, almost falling apart, bird feeder hanging by old chain from a branch of an oak tree outside the kitchen window; the wood of this homemade feeder was weathered and gray and lichen grew on the roof of it. I bought my first bag of bird seed at the local farm store, filled the feeder, and from that moment on, every time I was at the sink, washing dishes or rinsing vegetables, I was kept entertained with the flutterings, songs, baby-feeding, and comings and goings, of chicadees, nuthatches, wrens, bright-yellow finches, and my forever favorites, the cardinals. The trees were full of them, perched in a line on branches, waiting their turn at the feeders. I discovered that blue jays are bullies, too big for the feeders, but they manage to attach themselves anyway and scare the little birds away. Yellow, brown, blue, black and red birds, spots of color in the woods. Pretty soon my trees were filled with bird feeders and there were little flocks of ground feeders under them . . . One little movement, if I went out the back door, they’d all fly away at once.
Henry David Thoreau wrote that he “once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden and I felt I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I would be by any honor bestowed upon me.” I’m so jealous, I’ve been waiting, but no sparrows have landed on me yet. I do try to lure them with interesting feeders, which come in all shapes and sizes, some better than others. This one with the red roof was great because lots of birds could crowd inside at one time, out of the rain and snow, and it was easy to fill with seed; the squirrels liked it because they thought it was a perfect little house, a big grocery-filled kitchen, just for them.
This is as close as they will let me get at bath time. Birds are on a schedule, like us, they feed at certain times, morning and night with a few visits during the day, and bath time seems to take place in the late afternoon sun. When I come back from tea at Lowely’s, and find bunnies grazing on the lawn, doves (cooing) on the barn, cardinals and squirrels feeding from seed dropped from the feeders into the driveway, and birds frolicking at the bird bath, I feel like my garden is Disneyland!
♥ ♥ ♥
So yesterday, The birds still weren’t used to the screen being gone and me right there . . . but somebody, try to guess who, had no problem at all . . .
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I could show you three different videos of this same squirrel coming back! But I couldn’t get the birds to cooperate. I won’t give up, will try again. Watching them is sort of like watching fish swim around in a tank, only better, mesmerizing! We love them year round, but especially in the winter; their happy, light-hearted energy with feathers blowing in the icy wind as they swing on the feeders gives whimsy to a scene which might otherwise be just gray leafless trees and cold white sky. And if you feed them all winter, they stick around in the summer and eat mosquitoes! So if you have a tree that might like to feel more useful this winter, once he is finished with his job of shading you or giving you fruit, you can give him (and you) the gift of a bird feeder. ♥
Bird song is the first nature thing I hear in the morning — probably seeing Cinderella as a child is what turned me into a bird lover! I mean, please, they make beds! ♥
My first birds, age six, crayons. My heart was in it from the beginning. ♥
When I first moved to Martha’s Vineyard, Norman Rockwell was alive and well and living in his beloved Stockbridge, Massachusetts home. It occurred to me that I should probably try and go see him; I could picture myself walking up his driveway to shake his hand so clearly that it still seems it might have really happened. The 
sensibilities behind his art were so wonderful, and exactly how I felt. His paintings made me fall in love with his understanding and view of the human heart. But of course, I never went there, I didn’t want to bother him. Joe and I have now been to Stockbridge many times, have visited his museum and studio; I picked this stick up from the front yard of his studio to save. One of my prized possessions. My Norman Rockwell Stick. I photographed it where it lives, on my art table, hopefully osmosing genius out into my studio like gamma rays. The paper it’s sitting on is one of the throw-away scraps I use to check colors on my brush and test my pen to make sure it isn’t going to drop a clump of ink on the watercolor I’m working on. I like to think Norman Rockwell had one of these too. 
So I thought today, I might give you a tour of my watercolor world. And you don’t have to come all the way to Martha’s Vineyard to do it, I’m only as far away as your computer! Above, is a photo I took when I was working on the page I did to honor Tasha Tudor — this sweet corgi (hopefully like one of hers) and one of her lovely quotes . . . you’ll find the finished product when you turn your November calendar page over to December in a few months. 
After I finish doing a page for a book or calendar, it gets scanned into the computer, which allows me future access to it (another miracle), and the original art goes into these acid-free boxes, and then into this huge old bank safe Joe found for me. All the original pages for my books, along with everything I’ve ever painted, is stored here.
You know I only started doing watercolors just after I turned thirty? (You must, by now :-)) Even though I paint almost every day, it’s still a surprise to see my art table covered with paintboxes and brushes and know they’re mine. I think it’s because I didn’t grow up with them. Needles, thread, and embroidery hoops make more sense to me than brushes and paint! Sometimes I walk into the studio early in the morning, before the sun has come up…all quiet, birds singing in the rhododendren outside the window, or in the winter, when I paint to the hum of the furnace, with Girl Kitty on her pillow keeping me company, and a blank piece of paper in front of me, waiting for my brush and that first drop of color, and wonder how this all came about.
This was my first painting. It was a plant sitting on my kitchen table; I filled a little pot with water, squeezed some watercolors from tubes into a plastic dish I’d bought, sharpened a pencil, sat down in front of it and started drawing. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I just looked at the plant and tried to put what I saw on the paper. Everyone was shocked that it looked like a geranium! I was shocked! Because it was a geranium! This was one of those life-changing moments that are sometimes only visible in the rear-view mirror. One of the reasons I want to encourage people to “just try it” when it comes to watercolor is because I’m sure that this must have been inside me my whole life, and I had no idea. I doodled just like anyone else, random squiggles; drawings of stick people; not the slightest inclination that there could be more. If this ability could be hiding inside me, it might be inside you. 
What really matters is practice! In my 7th grade art class, we spent the entire semester drawing our thumbs! Seriously, that’s what we did, left thumb stuck up in front of me, pencil in right hand; the teacher went over and over it, showing us how to really look at things, the curve, the edge, the shadows, the lines. I can still draw a good thumb if I want to. That’s what I mean about practice. If you look at the art in my first book, Heart of the Home, and compare it to later work, like the calendar or the Autumn book, you can see what a big help practice can be.
quilts, straw hats, my old stove, and my kitty; I hung them all over my kitchen, called them “kitchen art,” and gave them away as Christmas presents. Soon my friends were asking to buy them, giving me confidence to do more and more. My first painting sold to the outside world in a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and after that I began to have local art shows. I took Polaroid’s of the paintings as I did them, which is a good thing, because they’re almost all gone. I still have a few of my favorites. These framed apples came with me from California to Martha’s Vineyard and hang in my kitchen now.
I still love using the things around me as my subjects, although you might not know it to look at this — probably a little hard to believe that these “birds” might be “around me.” (BTW, see that real feather lying on the paper? Inspiration! And I know he’s not a real partridge, I just called him that, he’s actually a made-up bird!) Here’s a 20 second video I took that explains . . . (they aren’t really my children :-))
This one became a greeting card, which I framed for her along with the original photo.
I’m often asked what kind of art supplies I use, so I thought I’d tell you. These are my brushes, but I almost always use the smallest one, there in the middle. It’s a # 1 Windsor Newton University Series 233. I was shocked the first time my brush wore out — who knew paintbrushes wore out?! Now I buy them by the fistfuls.
The paint comes from everywhere, including children’s paint boxes. Actually I love any kind of paint box; Prang and Pelikan have been my favorites. I use watercolor paint tubes, like Holbein, Rowney or Grumbacher, I’m not particular about the brand, I just want as many colors as possible. This is my collection of reds 
