Emil Morhardt

A Sunny Afternoon with Whimbrels

2019

Artist Comments
Artist Emil Morhardt paints a glaucous-winged gull lifting off Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska. He paints the bird splashing the crystalline water in detailed realism. "These big gulls are unafraid of brown bears, dodging between their legs to grab morsels," says Emil. He highlights the piece with a silvery edge reflecting a dazzlingly sunny day.

About the Artist
Emil Morhardt is an acrylic painter from Santa Barbara, California who expresses his passion for birds through realistic acrylic paintings. He paints at home in a studio room that has large windows and a north-facing view of the mountains. He observes the animals from this window, watching roadrunners, foxes, bobcats, deer, and coyote run by. Surrounded by this wildlife, Emil paints bird portraits reminiscent of those by artist John James Audubon. He bases his paintings off hundreds of photographs he takes of birds in the wild and at wildlife recovery centers. Emil captures the freedom and inquisitiveness that birds display in the natural world. Before painting birds, he painted landscapes of San Francisco and the Eastern Sierra. Emil was raised in the high desert of California and learned to paint from his father, who was one of the early California watercolorists...

Artist Comments
Long-Billed Curlews, some of the largest of the shorebirds, often hang out together, milling around at the edge of the surf, then wading in to feed. I spotted...

Artist Comments
Willets are usually at the edge of the surf, poking into the wet sand as they follow each wave in and out. This one, when I came on him, was standing above th...

Artist Comments
Sometimes these handsome ducks, who feed at the Santa Barbara Bird Refuge by plowing through the water with their bills open, take a break from shoveling and ...

Artist Comments
"Great horned owls spend a lot of time sitting and intently watching, rotating their heads to look at whatever interests them, including me," shares artist Emil Morhardt...

Artist Comments
A close-up view of two ducks looking astutely at the viewer. "There's something highly engaging, and perhaps a little unsettling, about the way these young fe...