Just Completed: Taita Thrush
Watercolor, 31″ x 23″ on Legion Special Handmade Rough 300 lb rag paper: $10,000
I was donated a few sheets of this exquisite handmade paper from an unknown (secret) mill, by Michael Ginsberg from Legion paper, and I’ve been having tremendous success with it. It’s the most incredible wet-on-wet stock I have ever worked with.
It can pill a bit if overworked, as the surface sizing is delicate, but if you play to its strengths it rewards you with fabulous granulation and it lifts better than anything I’ve ever seen. If one is careful, one can even glaze, as can be seen in the leaves and the cast shadow.
It won’t take liquid frisket or film, so I plan accordingly. It does have stunning vibrancy, especially for handmade paper, as most other handmade papers are too absorbent, and paint reactivates so absolutely that one can easily feather back and re-bleed even dry edges.
I enjoyed its capacity for deliberate blooms (which you can see on the head and chest areas) and the overall feel of painting is joyous.
The subject is one of Kenya’s rarest birds, with only a couple of hundred surviving in specific fragments of montane rainforest in the Taita hills area, in the southeast of Kenya.