I count most birds as slightly skittish friends, and oystercatchers in particular are such noisy, flashy creatures. They make a very appealing subject. I’ve painted these old friends on just about every coast in the UK, both in the studio and out. This one was done from a photo, and you can watch the process video on my website here if you are interested. In this one, the birds are wading in the shallows right at the tideline, which throws wobbly reflections beneath them, seen here in big, simple brushstrokes.
One of the hallmarks of early Impressionism was the (then-revolutionary) idea of capturing an experience. Where traditional art had been heavily focused on staging grand, posed compositions which were painstakingly constructed in the studio, the Impressionists interested themselves in immediacy. Though the name Impressionism was initially coined as an insult, it came to be associated with the attempt to paint what the eye experiences in the moment - the impression of the viewer superseding the reality of the object. Water and light naturally lend themselves to this effort, since they are constantly moving and changing, and since their presence also often alters the viewer’s experience of an object, though the object itself remains unchanged. So those squiggly brushstrokes are perfectly obvious, yet the viewer still feels themself to be looking at the distorted, constantly-moving reflections of two noisy waders.
What Impressionism nonetheless fails to capture, however, is the experience of standing in the seriously cold sea wind of early spring, and the painter’s yellow knit hat. 😁