Green Woodpecker, parte dos.
If I had the means I would collect these anatomical watercolours by Tunnicliffe. He lived at Malltraeth on the Isle of Anglesey where the river Cefni flows across a wide estuary into the Bay of Caernarfon, just a few miles from my mother. Local youth and adults alike brought their bird finds (found dead, not otherwise) for him to make his astonishing anatomical paintings.
Like me he went fto Manchester School of Art and on to The Royal Academy of Arts where he was famously asked why he wasn’t seen there more often. To which he replied,
“I prefer the birds of Anglesey to the birds of Piccadilly”.
His works are important because of their scientific value, but more than that they are important works of art. I have a marvellous book on the animal and plant studies of Albrecht Durer, that star of the renaissance, and I would say Tunnicliffe has the edge, even given the inquisitive advancement of his epoch.
P.S. He didn’t put his specimens on a pink Gingham table cloth. This is some ‘Photoshop’ idiosyncracy I can’t remove from my scan.
Derrick Holder said,
July 11, 2010 @ 8:20 am
The ‘Gingham table cloth’ can be removed in Photoshop, with Select > Color Range and sampling the background with Fuzziness set at something like 80.
The parts of the selection that are not to be modified can be removed using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, before increasing the brightness and contrast of the selected area to turn the background white.
The Woody Woodpecker song « Nightingales said,
March 27, 2011 @ 9:08 pm
[...] Sketches of green woodpecker by C.F. Tunnicliffe via Cortijada los Gazquez. [...]
Jacqui Oakley Illustration & Hand-Lettering said,
May 9, 2011 @ 12:27 am
[...] “Sketches of Bird Life” and “A Sketchbook of Birds”. Thanks to the sites Birdly Draw, losgazquez.com & Mouse Notebook for these amazing [...]