Kittiwakes

I am really enjoying the flying bird/Khadi paper/triptych paintings I have been doing. I visited my daughter in Newcastle recently and there is a large kittiwake colony in the city, and it was fantastic to see the birds being welcomed and protected despite the no-doubt negative impact (pardon pun!) of copious quantities of guano inflicted upon the buildings and infrastructure:

I am fond of kittiwakes as they are my Ma’s favourite gull and when my children were small, we used to visit the kittiwake colony at Seaford Head here in Sussex. I like their delicacy and grace, and their little black feet and yellow beaks; a herring gull landed on the viewing platform when I was at the Baltic Centre and it looked positively brutish compared to the kittiwakes:

The birds are unfazed by their human viewers and were perched with chicks of various ages along the ledge at the Centre. It was wonderful to see them so close and watch them launch off the side of the building, even though the precipitous environment that the chicks were bumbling around on gave me, as someone with absolutely no head for heights, a bad case of the heebie-jeebies…

So, on to the paintings. I love to use Instagram for images as I get to connect with the photographer and the pictures are more personal. However, as is the way with the marvel that is the search facility, the word kittiwake is not limited to gulls and I was trawling through pictures of shipwrecks and clothing brands, so I relied on stock images and my bird books for these three:

Like the barn owls, they are gouache and pencil on 6″ square Khadi paper, which takes the paint extremely well. I also like the rough edges.

I have framed these in the same way as the owls: