Chris Forrest

Common Terns, American Realist Lithograph by Chris Forrest

1980

Artist Comments
Artist Emil Morhardt depicts an Elegant Tern and a Forster’s Tern hanging together in the winter shallows of the Santa Barbara beach in California. Their evening reflections ripple above the water highlighted in gold, silver, and copper leaf. "While the Elegant Terns show up in huge flocks, the much smaller Forester’s tern is uncommon in Santa Barbara, and so a treat to see."

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...