Susan Hostetler

Woodpecker Conversation

2023

Artist Comments
Artist Emil Morhardt captures a group of acorn woodpeckers diving together from a tree. “They really do this,” says Emil. He spends hours with his lens trained on the birds as they argue loudly among themselves until finally taking a jump. The woodpeckers are painted on a thick layer of absorbent ground, giving them a slightly three-dimensional appearance against the gray-stained canvas.

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...