On Painting a Cormorant

The finished painting, Mate, 12 x 12 inches, oil on panel. Cormorants get that bright blue/turquoise color inside their beaks and tongues during mating season.

I'm painting a portrait. I'm painting a portrait of a cormorant and I can't paint a cormorant because I don't know what it's like to be a cormorant. What is a cormorant anyway, I mean what is it like to be a cormorant? A cormorant is a very strange, often overlooked sea bird. It is black as night with fierce blue eyes and star-shaped pupils, it lives on rocks and flies like a duck and dives under huge waves hunting fish, it swims well but doesn't shed water like other sea birds, so it's often seen perched on a rock with its wings open, air drying. It has a long, calloused, flaking beak that tilts skywards like its waiting for something from above, it lives in small flocks but doesn't seem to make any sounds, and it hunts alone. Impossible to relate to? I saw many dead ones on the beach this summer, they're suffering from some illness, or too few fish in the sea. Last year I painted one on a rock by the sea in the evening, but a close-up portrait is different, and I'm not sure it will work.

My cormorant is a he, that much i know, and with that upturned beak he seems arrogant, but also a little dumb unfortunately. The painting remains unfinished because I don't get him yet, can't relate. I started the painting last summer and had it in my show this spring, but I never liked it so I took it off the rack on Tuesday and scraped it down and repainted. He's sharper now but still glaring at me with this dumb vacant stare. I'll scrape him down again, turn up those turqoise eyes, and give him the white breeding plumes they get in mating season, maybe a blade of nesting grass hanging from his beak. That could work, we'll see. I might have to abandon it, I threw out a painting of a bluebird last week that wasn't working. Throwing out a painting is also a way of finishing it, strangely.

The finished painting Woodpecker, 12 x 12 inches, oil on panel. It went through half a year of revisions.

I have ten, twenty, thirty mostly-finished paintings, my studio is full, I start them and I restart them but finishing a painting is very difficult. Many I could get away with as they are but they're just not quite good enough, I mean, good enough just isn't good enough, you know? Very frustrating, very difficult to finish a painting. I have five or six birds that could be done but aren't, including a woodpecker, but who can relate to a woodpecker? It's just too far outside the human experience to pound your face into a tree. Or is it all too familiar, at least for the naturally stubborn amongst us? Yes, the woodpecker I can finish. Then I've got ten small candy paintings that some of them need a brighter glaze, I've got a pile of watercolors I don't know what to do with, and I've got a few large-scale figure paintings, one from Africa, one from Sweden, these I really want to work on. A lot to do.