Click on image for full view Early Thaw—Ruffed Grouse Reproduced from an original watercolor and gouache painting, which appeared on the cover of Bird Watchers Digest, February, 1996. Here in upstate New York, winters are long and icy. When the thaw finally arrives, and the melting snow slops into slush with each footstep, the woods take on a wonderful aroma of mud and rotting leaves. It is then that I often encounter Ruffed Grouse on my walks through the woods—but I rarely notice them before they burst from the underbrush. And after the blur of beating wings has vanished into the shadows, I am always left with the giddy feeling that it was I who got flushed! In this painting, I‘ve tried to capture the muddy grays and browns of late winter. Woodland interiors are a tangle of trunks and twigs, and are extremely difficult to paint. I have tried to simplify—selecting lines that work with the rhythms of my composition, and I’ve used subtle shifts of color and tome to create the illusion of space within the forest. The head-on view of the displaying grouse was also a challenge—but no other pose shows off the ruff as dramatically.
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