Feathers

Bills and beaks are a fascinating yet strange part of a bird or duck of any kind. Their shape, color and size seem to have no limits with me. The clay will often start - as always - as a piece of slab looking for a shape to fit comfortably on a head of no particular design. Once the bill or beak starts to take shape, so then does the head. Sometimes it’s a bird and sometimes it’s a duck! It’s always so fluid. To watch the evolution of a lump of clay as it moves through the process of finding out who it is going to be, is part of my creative wonderment. Isn’t it amazing that it can all start with what the mouth becomes?

The character of a bird as it develops is facinating to watch unfold. Let’s talk about their feet. Are they webbed? Do they have long and skinny toes with sharp toe nails like daggers? Will there be big feathers on big wings or small fuzzy down close to the body which seem to be of no real use of all? All of this development goes along in one way or another until a bird begins to resemble a species of some kind who lends itself to creative interpretation. Realism is never a hope, vague recognition with a smile is my only goal.