Winner of the “Best Animals & Birds” category of the December 2023 PleinAir Salon, Biruta Hansen’s Who’s Hiding? depicts a partly camouflaged rabbit (our family calls the abundant critters “bunnies”) peeking out from a profusion of grass and wildflowers. Or does it?
Taking a cue from the title, if we look harder we start to see who’s really hiding here. Truly blending in with the lush setting, there’s a praying mantis in the left foreground, opposite a frog in the other corner. There’s also a dragonfly, a spider, and perhaps other wildlife that my eyes missed.
Biruta Akerbergs Hansen combines science and art in her approach to artistic representation of wildlife. Among the many books she’s illustrated, the pop-up book with the same name follows suit with her salon-sinning painting.
Hansen’s paintings and scientific illustrations highlight the beautiful complexity of the natural world without pretending it’s all pretty all the time. She’ll paint you lush green tomato leaves, but she’ll also show you the beetles, grubs, and worms beneath the soil that allow them to grow as they do. “Making the most complicated or disturbing subject matter compelling to the viewer has always been as important to me as creating a work of beauty,” she says.
“Painting a life size fiberglass cow as a fundraiser for the Harrisburg Cow Parade paved the way for my transition from microcosm to macrocosm,” she says. “At present I paint walls that sometimes measure up to 5,000 square feet (450 square meters) with a four-inch (10cm) brush and a nine inch (23cm) roller.”
Murals on this scale are a dramatic change from the many years she spent drawing and reconstructing specimens measuring in micro millimeters through the microscope at the American and National Museums of Natural History in New York and Washington, DC.
“I reconstructed vertebrate fossils on paper and illustrated the genitalia of some of the tiniest moths in existence by focusing through the complex layers of the dissected tissues,” she quips.
She ended up combining science and art as a career after earning a Bachelor degree in Biology from the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and evening courses at Cooper Union for the Arts and Sciences supplemented by study at the Art Students’ League in New York.
“The educational aspect and the research involved in preparation for the art have always played an important role in my work,” she says. “The training I gained in art schools laid a strong groundwork for the disciplines of art that I have mastered that include, besides various painting media, paper engineering pop-up books and working in glass.”
A degree in biology is NOT a prerequisite for painting animals though. If you’d like to be able to paint a portrait of your pet or wildlife you see around you or in images, you may want to check out Gina Rossi Armfield’s No Excuses Watercolor painting animals video.
If oil or drawing is more your thing, browse a wide variety of videos on painting and drawing animals here.
The Power of Light in Wintertime
Aaron Schuerr Winter Waters, pastel, 18 x 14 in.
“The next time the sun comes out after a snowstorm, I suggest you take a stroll in your neighborhood,” says Aaron Schuerr. “Look at the light bouncing from the snow onto a house, and the color of the house back onto the surface of the snow. Make tracks and peer into the holes; the shadow color radiates as though there is a blue light buried down deep. Back alleys can provide a masterclass in light and shadow patterns. Observe the color along tire tracks as they move from light to shadow and back to light again. Note the shift in the color of a long cast shadow from source to terminus. In short, look down, look around, and feel a growing sense of wonder at the power of light in wintertime.”
Inside his video, Winter Sunset in Pastel, Aaron Schuerr will show you the deeper and more meaningful side of painting — how to translate the essence of any scene onto your paper and narrate an emotionally resonant story through your art. His brilliant teaching prowess will get you to see — really see — a whole new world that is hidden from the eyes of untrained artists.
