ART OF GEORGE WILLIAM VAN HUMBECK

I am a collector. Besides the photographs I have taken, I collect reference photos from periodicals, books, calendars, sometimes even the television. Most of which are of birds. Second hand stores are a good source for books. As my wife can attest, I am a bird nut much to her chagrin. I know that there are several landscape and seascape painting of mine that are missing a bird or two due to my wife's influence. On one occasion I watercoloured a killdeer, cut it out and taped it to a painting just to see how long it would take her to notice. A day.

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I love trumpeter swans. Mating for life, magnificent in flight, cantankerous on the ground, they are the largest waterfowl in North America. Efforts to repopulate the species in Ontario seem to be working.

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This composition proved to be challenging. I had a reference photo that looked like the swans were swimming in porridge. I so much wanted to play with reflections in the painting especially considering the mother's neck. This proved to be a valuable lesson. It was not just a matter of drawing a mirror image. I had to consider this problem in three dimensions not just two. Consider the cygnet in the center of the painting, because the body is angled away from our point of view, the length of head in the reflection is shorter.

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The whole time I was working on this painting I had not decided on the height of the panel for the composition. When it came time to paint the reflection in the foreground, I just kept going until I was satisfied. Then I made a trip to the table saw.