Rosy-Crowned Hearts Prints: Élio

Every bird who enters my studio to have their portrait painted brings a presence that shifts the light.

Some arrive boldly, like Elian, the American Goldfinch, who hovered before landing, as if asking the air itself whether the moment is ripe. Others, like Simi, one of the Rosy Finches, carried the wind with them, nervous, flickering, half-ready to vanish. But all who stayed long enough to be seen offered something rare: trust.

They do not come for decoration. They do not pose out of vanity. They come, I believe, to be witnessed, actually. And when that happens, when a bird meets your eye and doesn’t flee, something quiet and immense passes between you. That is what I try to paint. Not feathers alone, but gravity. Spirit. A stillness that feels like a breath just before it’s taken.

Each portrait takes more than a hundred hours. The larger ones— owls, especially queens — can take three times that. I paint until the form no longer needs me. Until I cannot find another curve to refine, another glint to coax forward. Until it feels as if the bird might turn, at any moment, and speak.

There’s a particular stillness that arrives only at the very end of a portrait, when I step back and the bird is no longer just painted, but present. It never happens all at once. Each brushstroke, each minute shift of light across a wing or the quiet gleam in an eye, carries its own small uncertainty. But when every part finally settles, and no more beauty needs to be coaxed forward—that’s when the painting begins to breathe. That’s when it becomes something that watches back.

My hope is that, now, it finds you. That you’ll feel some part of the reverence and quiet wonder that shaped it and that this bird, once seen, might stay with you a much longer than expected.