Emil Morhardt

A Northern Shoveler Churning

2019

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 rotate in a circle to check things out, churning up the water around them. I painted him with the surprised look they usually seem to have, although he was in no way intimidated and went right back to feeding a few feet from me. They have strikingly iridescent heads, which sometimes look black, and other times intensely colorful.

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. Emil has a BA in Zoology from Pomona College and a PhD in Environmental Physiology and Ecology from Rice University. He also was a Professor of Environmental Biology at Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges.

A Northern Shoveler Churning
Emil Morhardt
Acrylic painting on stretched canvas
Finished white edges
Varnished
One-of-a-kind
Signed on front
2019
30 in. h x 30 in. w x 1.5 in. d
4 lbs. 13 oz.