It began last winter. Living on the shores of Lake Michigan is always beautiful, but many January days are frigid.

It was a real winter—cold, clean, and unusually quiet, even for Chicago. The kind of cold that makes linseed oil smell sharper and the studio feel larger than it is.

A young Red Tail Hawk started visiting my windowsill. Morning, then late afternoon. Seven days in a row, precisely. Never hunting — only watching. Once, a single tap on the glass. Not loud. And yet it rang.

I told myself it was nothing. No. If I’m honest, I told myself it was something I would not understand. (I was right about that.)

That winter painting was fighting me. Or I fought myself. Same outcome. Nothing worth keeping. But the morning after the hawk’s seventh visit, I cracked the window. Just slightly. Enough for air, or company, to pass through.

That was when the birds began to arrive.

The first to come inside was the American Goldfinch, Elian, though I didn’t know his name at first. He didn’t enter timidly; he entered formally. He hovered above the mixing table, silent as a thought, while I failed, impatiently, at capturing the brilliant yellow-red of his feathers. Three times I missed by a hair. When at last the cadmium mix tipped the way evening tips, toward dusk, he settled. Not a word between us, only a shared consent: the work had begun.

But a portrait here is not a weekend affair. It is weeks.

Velaturas, not glazes—veils of color, thin like breath, each one a small secret carried over the last. The first layers I laid down were not feathers at all, not even really color. Studies. I filled paper with the under-architecture of him: the delicate bones, the hinge of the shoulder where the wing remembers flight before it chooses it, the faint, weightless coverts that refuse to be pinned to a single line. I learned to paint the space between feathers, the silence in their overlap. Slowly. So slowly.

Progress comes like winter light—brief, slanting, cautious. Those first days (weeks, truly) were mostly thinking with the brush. Marks that felt like hesitations. But toward the end, as the final veils begin to agree with one another, everything gathers speed. The painting discovers its own momentum and pulls me along, willingly or not. Elian sensed that before I did. He would sit still for hours, a votive flame of attention. Then, when I found some small rightness, the edge of shadow along the scapular, the fine yellow broken by the neat black of the cap, he would chirr and tremble with a kind of contained delight, as if the room itself had ripened.

He came almost every day. (Almost.)

On two occasions he brought a companion; once a young wren who clung to the window latch and tried hard not to look at me; once, implausibly, perfectly, a raptor who perched on the shelf over the bank of windows with the strict moral air of a teacher observing a lesson. I kept painting. No one corrected me. Not then.

One week after the first veil had dried true—when the yellow stopped arguing with me and lay calm on the panel—a piece of paper appeared on the windowsill. Folded scrap. Weighted by a pebble that had known lots of Lake Michigan water. A summons.

The Queen of the Barn Owls had learned what I had done.

That a Goldfinch had asked first. That a portrait had been begun—without her consent.

For a day there was a ripple in the forest, a small diplomatic weather. But birds, I’ve learned, are older than pride. Older than jealousy, too. (Not immune, of course. No one is.) The Queen did not ask me to stop. She asked for the story to be retold in her hearing, which is to say—remembered properly. Then, quite without ceremony, she appointed the Goldfinch her Vizier.

“He sees ripeness,” she said.

“And speaks only when color is ready.”

So I kept at it. Layer over layer. Veils thin as first snow. The pace quickened near the end;

how else to say it, as if the portrait wanted itself finished and I was finally allowed to participate. Elian watched, near-motionless, except when the likeness touched the narrow bridge between us. Then he grew excited, as though what lived in him and what lived in the paint had finally recognized each other across a great, ridiculous distance.

Since then, of course, others have come.

The Rosy Finches arrived together, shy and not shy. The Azure Flycatcher took his place as if the future depended upon the posture of his tail (perhaps it does). Two ravens brought their opinions on chiaroscuro and left them, like partially-understandable graffiti, on the silence. A pair of crows began annotating the margins of my sketchbook with tiny diagrams of light. Owls—so many owls—some who pose in stillness so complete it changes the air, others who correct me mid-brushstroke with a glance as sharp as a blade that never cuts.

Not every bird asks to be painted. Some come to watch. Others come to remember what they are when they are seen.

But each brings something.

A color.

A question.

A stillness I didn’t expect.

A gift, sometimes.

The studio, once private, has become an archive of the visible and the nearly invisible: longing, borrowed light, truth half-formed and patient. The work now is simple and not simple. To paint the birds who choose to be seen. To proceed by studies, then color-mixing and veils; slowly at first, then quickening. To listen for ripeness. To write down what can still be written while the paint is wet and the air is attentive.

The portraits are here. So are the birds and their stories.

Some of them might even know your name.