Shags and their brother cormorants are great subjects for my kind of artwork with their upright stance and long necks. Their silhouettes are distinctive and blend into the background easily when sitting on anything that looks like it could be a rock.
And the paintwork here looks convincingly like it's getting splattered by both waves and guano!
It always surprises me just how much is going on in our weathered surfaces. There are colours which always have greater tonal range than the new paint but then there are the ways that those colours merge together through flaking and cracking and general wearing away which leaves an infinite variety of never-boring pattern. No fleck or other shape is ever exactly repeated. And then even the relatively unworn parts have subtle texture to them: little bumps and rippling wrinkles revealed by the light coming from above. This close-up detail shows what I mean. Weathering is a great artist!
I live in Thailand and spend some time almost every day watching the wildlife around me, which is at times quite spectacular, but it seems my inspiration for my artwork comes from further afield as we do not have shags in Thailand. After almost 50 years of being a naturalist, I have read a lot about wild places and seen way too many wildlife programmes on TV plus all those hours spent with binoculars in hand over the years in different places. There is just so much to be inspired by in the natural world. And there is always more. Yesterday I found my first ever Wandering Hammerhead Worm which could now easily turn into an art subject. Perhaps I should try to use more animals that I am less familiar with.
The part I photographed for this artwork is fairly easy to spot in this fence (depending on your screen size, of course), half way up just to the left of the blue telegraph pole.
To be convincing as rocks in the foreground for the birds to perch on the photograph needed to be rotated. As shown below, it doesn't quite work as well in the original orientation but could perhaps have been somewhere for some bats to hang.
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