Geninne D. Zlatkis - Geninne’s Art: Birds in Watercolor, Collage, and Ink: A Field Guide to Art Techniques and Observing in the Wild

Paper feathers I made for a collage

My dad was an avid amateur photographer and gave me my first real camera when I was fourteen. It quickly became another medium, another way of expressing myself and focusing on the way I saw things. Taking pictures helped me to hone in on something beautiful and capture it in time. Photography is every bit as important to me as painting, and, in fact, it preceded painting as a love in my life.

Nature photography reminds me to look, and look closer, and then even closer. The more I do that, the more the birds and flowers I love can live on their own in my imagination and become part of my visual vocabulary. I like to think Im collecting images when I take photos.

My paintings are my interpretations of nature. Ive never tried to do photographically accurate paintings. Nonetheless, the things Ive looked at through my lens all my life are on my worktable, right along with my colorful memories of places and travels when I set out to paint.

New Mexico has so much of what I love. My favorite color is blue in all its shades. Turquoise is prominent everywhere hereon doors, painted furniture, the natural turquoise stones found in the nearby mines of Cerrillos and Madrid, and bright mountain bluebirds flying all around and contrasting with the bright red of the chile ristras that are used to decorate the outsides of houses and buildings.

So this is my field guide to the way that I work, and to the birds and flowers that appear in my work and are my inspiration. I invite you to join me on my travels outdoors in nature, and then back indoors to my studio, and wherever imagination leads us from there.

Come play with me,

People ask me all the time how I got started drawing birds. I think it was about the same time that I discovered watercolors. I was twenty-five and had finished art school, and I took a few months to live by the beach in Mexico. Thats when I started painting in watercolor, and thats when I started noticingreally noticingbirds. And then they took over! When youre not going to school or working full-time, you can spend more time appreciating nature, and I did just that.

Mexico has wonderful birds: brilliant red flycatchers, blue Stellers jays, little songbirds that look like they rolled around in a pan of watercolors, parrots, lots of different hummingbirds and owls. Its easy to become obsessed with watching their activities and nest building and listening to them singing and talking. The little ones particularly. I love sparrows. Theyre so small but theyre out there being who they are in the world.

At the same time, when I started drawing and painting birds, I discovered that it wasnt so easy. Bird forms seem simple, but I really had to work hard at figuring out how to get all the parts to be harmonioushow to position the legs to look natural when they stood, or perched, or took off, and how to pose their heads in familiar positions. And dont get me started on the wings! It took a lot of practice before I understood wings and feathers enough to be comfortable drawing them and finally to return them to simple forms on a piece of paper.