Probably best known locally for painting pelicans, seagulls, and other coastal birds, acrylic artist Emil Morhardt embraced a new approach for his latest exhibit at Gallery Los Olivos, which is scheduled to run through November.
“Most of my previous work was painted on white backgrounds. But in this show, I have many images on black and gray backgrounds—which are very dramatic,” Morhardt said. “I have also included more inland birds, whereas the previous exhibits have been focused on shorebirds.”
The artist’s new showcase, Portraits of Santa Barbara Birds, will include 28 paintings, all previously unexhibited. Morhardt started working on the paintings in April, shortly after COVID-19 mitigation measures began. Prior to the pandemic, Morhardt had planned trips to Greenland and other destinations this year, options he called “out the window” for a while.
“But at least I have got a lot of guitar and piano playing in,” said Morhardt, who found ample time at home for music and painting during voluntary quarantine.
Portraits of Santa Barbara Birds marks the third in-person exhibit Gallery Los Olivos has hosted since its reopening in September. Morhardt will be on-site working at the gallery himself on Nov. 1 and Nov. 13 through 15, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. all four days.
A Santa Barbara-based artist and retired biology professor, Morhardt has been painting nearly all of his life, as he learned to paint at an early age from his father, a watercolorist and art teacher. One theme that combines Morhardt’s love for birds and career as a biologist is his passion for the environment. Morhardt worked as an operations director for an environmental consulting firm before teaching environmental biology at Claremont McKenna College. He retired in 2017.
Morhardt is also a seasoned photographer and always uses his own photographic references of birds to paint from. For Portraits of Santa Barbara Birds, Morhardt painted 12 different species that can be found on the Central Coast, including marbled godwits, great blue herons, great egrets, great horned owls, barn owls, California scrub jays, and roadrunners.
“I’ve also been experimenting with gray transparent acrylic washes as backgrounds on a series of 24-by-24-inch canvases of groups of crows, ravens, and acorn woodpeckers,” said Morhardt, who painted from photographs he had taken of birds at Lake Cachuma, Mission Canyon, Hendry’s Beach, the Carrizo Plain, and other areas.
Morhardt’s goal as a painter is “to capture the freedom, inquisitiveness, and social interactions that birds show in the natural world,” he explained.
Using a high level of detail, Morhardt is able to illustrate a unique, individual personality within each bird he paints.
“It’s easy to think of ‘birds of a feather’ as being nearly identical, but when you start watching them carefully you quickly see it isn’t so. It’s particularly obvious when I examine the high-resolution photos that I take as reference materials for my paintings,” the artist said.
“My paintings are about understanding what individual birds are doing and how different individuals of the same species vary from one another in appearance and behavior over the year and throughout their lifetimes.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is feeling peckish. Send wings to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2020.