Andean Hummingbirds

 One of the new series of paintings that I'm brainstorming is of hummingbirds I saw in Ecuador last year.  I booked the trip through Gate 1 Travel as a 10-day tour around the Andes, Cloud Forest and Amazon Rainforest and with each place we visited I felt like the adventure was designed just for me... birding, hiking, zip-lining, waterfalls, epic rivers, an active volcano, hot springs, moss-covered and lichen-laden everything.  I think about Ecuador almost daily and its memory has become that happy place I go to in my mind when life becomes overwhelming...

I wanted to travel by myself but went with a tour company so I wasn't entirely alone.  We saw a LOT and some areas we were able to explore for awhile and others we spent only snippets of time in.  One of those locations was the Sachatamia Lodge in the Mindo Cloud Forest - we had a beautiful lunch there and were able to walk the grounds, I wish we could have stayed all week!  It's a sanctuary for hummingbirds and they have all sorts of them coming to their feeders...hummingbirds that only live in that part of the world that you will never see anywhere else - what a truly special sight to behold.  I stood there near the feeders and took in the sound of their wings.  Some species there are small and buzzed around (like you would expect one to do), some were large like "regular" birds with a definitive flapping (though fast), and others have long tail feathers that you can hear swish around softly as they move while feeding - this is the soundtrack for my happy place, a symphony of feathers!  A favorite bird of mine was the Silfo Colivioleta, or Violet-tailed sylph... the bird was lovely but the word sylph entertained me too since it means "imaginary spirit of the air".  Yes, they did seem just like that, little spirits!  Another favorite was the Booted Racket-tail with its puffy white booties and its long, thin tail ending in disc-like feathers.  Unfortunately the racket-tail was the most skiddish of the birds, so it was difficult to get a photo from the feeder that wasn't blurry...  

I'm at a point now where I think about these little creatures so much and I want to put them into artwork that portrays the same flurry of energy that I felt when I stood among them.  That's where the brainstorming comes in!  The current plan is to make prints on stonehenge paper from collograph plates inspired by textures of the cloud forest.  I will make the printing plates from acrylic gels (and document the process of course!).  I envision layers of color and line that start from something representational but end up looking more abstract and those will be the backgrounds/environments for the hummingbirds!  Something in a similar vein as this image I made a couple years ago, but with birds!:

I'll be posting updates as I go, but for now, the drawing and watercolor study phase!