An Odd Source of Inspiration

I recently went to a cafe with Nick and I saw this painting hanging up on the wall:

The original painting is called "Mystery of the Missing Migrants" and is by artist Charley Harper.

I recognized it because I used to have it in the form of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.

Whoever painted the one in the cafe had given it a different title, signed their name to it and was attempting to sell it with no mention of Harper whatsoever.

This bothered me immensely so I sent an email to the cafe telling them about the origin of the piece and asking them to contact the artist or the studio that provided the replica.

The reproduction did some good however in that it got me interested in Harper's art again.

I spent a lot of time looking at cached images of his work on Google.

I decided to try and apply his methods to paintings of New Zealand's bird life but, unlike the cafe artist, I have created work that is my own and I give credit to Harper for inspiring it.

My first painting was of a Goldfinch and I was pretty happy with the results:

Below are some other examples of Harper's work:

As you can see, Charley's birds are minimalist and reduced down to basic geometric shapes. 

Tails are triangles, bodies are semi circles and legs are angles. Despite this simplification, the richness of the colors and patterns make the birds easy to recognize.

As a lifelong hater of math, I was surprised at how much sense geometry started to make when it took this form. 

Getting the circle, semi circle, angle and triangle ratios correct is easy because the bird looks wrong if they aren't done properly. 

I can almost feel long unused places in my brain waking up when I work on the rough drawings in my sketchbook.

So far I have done the Goldfinch, a Kokako and a Fantail. I'm thinking of doing a larger painting of Kea for the baby's room.