Denise Mumm

Pelicans at Hilton Head, Acrylic Painting on Wood Panel, 2020

2020

Artist Comments
Artist Emil Morhardt displays an impressionist portrait of three brown pelicans. The birds sun themselves in the Sea of Cortez against a subtle greenish-blue late afternoon sky. "I hadn't thought about pelicans having a 3D vision like hawks until I was looking over my photos and saw one of the birds staring straight at me," shares Emil. He references his photographs from a National Geographic Zodiac that the pelicans seemed curious about, allowing very close viewing.

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...