Artist and Naturalist 
James Coe is best known as author and illustrator of the Golden field guide, Eastern Birds.© 

He has contributed illustrations to numerous other field guides, as well, including the recently reissued Easy Bird Guide: Western Region, and Birds of New Guinea, and to Frank Gill's widely-used college textbook Ornithology. His landscape paintings have been featured in Fine Art Connoisseur (formerly Plein Air magazine), and his artwork was the subject of a feature article in the May-June 2003 issue of Wildlife Art.

Jim's paintings also have appeared on the covers of Sanctuary, Bird Watcher's Digest, Birding World, The Raptor Journal, and Auk, the professional journal of the American Ornithologist's Union. For years, his bird illustrations were featured as "Birds of the Week" on the Cornell website BirdSource.James Coe

Jim

 

A signature member of the Society of Animal Artists, Jim has exhibited in the Society's annual exhibition, as well as the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's prestigious "Birds in Art", and in the Bennington Center for the Arts' annual "Art of the Animal Kingdom." He is represented in the permanent collections of the New York State Museum, Massachusetts Audubon Society, Bennington Center for the Arts, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, and the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum. Jim also has been cited in numerous published surveys of modern wildlife painting.

 

Studying birds from life is essential to Jim's bird art, and he works in the field whenever he can. The greatest challenge of painting birds, says Jim, is to capture the unique character and personality of each species. In the studio, he may redraw a sketch ten or twenty times on successive overlays of tracing paper, subtly refining the pose and shape-even the placement of an eye-until the drawing comes to life on the page.

 

Jim’s illustrations and field guide plates are rendered in watercolor and gouache. The work is slow and exacting. Each plate of birds may take more than a week to complete.  (Jim’s techniques for creating field guide plates are more completely described on the field guides page). For reference, he draws from photographs, bird specimens borrowed from museum collections, and, most importantly, from nearly 30 years of field experience. 

In recent years, Jim has devoted most of his time to plein air (on site) landscape painting in oil paints. Jim's landscapes have been published and exhibited in galleries across the country; they also provide reference material for larger studio paintings - works into which Jim will often insert a bird that he noted while at that location. 

 

POND LIGHT, NOVEMBER 
Oil/linen/board  16 X 12

CLIMAX FARM
Oil/linen/board  16 X 12

The skills that Jim has honed while working in plein air, where he must work fast and instinctively to capture the fleeting light and dynamic conditions of the landscape, are quite analogous to skills he had previously developed for sketching an active bird as it foraged or preened. Both rely on careful observation and an astute visual memory. But the vigor and energy required to move paint across a large canvas are new to Jim's work, and they have clearly influenced his recent studio paintings of birds.

JANUARY HAYFIELDS—ROUGH-LEGGED HAWK, Oil/linen 18½ x 29

 

Jim grew up in the suburbs of New York City. As a youngster, he was fascinated by the egrets and shorebirds he spotted in nearby tidal marshes, and he quickly learned to identify many of the birds he found around town. He began to paint when, with a friend, he set out to compile a field guide to the local birds. His first drawing was published in The Living Bird when he was just 18 years old. Jim went on to study biology at Harvard, but received no formal education in art until he attended graduate school as a young adult. In 1984, he earned an MFA degree in painting from the Parson's School of Design in New York.

Today Jim lives with his wife and two children on the western rim of New York's Hudson River Valley. From his studio, perched on the second story of a recent addition to their nineteenth-century farmhouse, Jim can look out on woodlands, a meadow, and a small pond. He has spotted 142 species of birds on the property. Among his favorites are the Red-shouldered Hawks that nest in the woods not far from the house, and a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers that recently have been visiting his suet feeders.

He continues to divide his time between plein air landscapes and larger studio canvases of birds in landscape settings. He also teaches weekend landscape painting workshops.

 

Jim's house and studio

 

 

Pileated Woodpeckers at the suet feeder