One spring, a pair of woodpeckers decided to collect acorns and store them in a palm tree adjacent to the house. From the second story of our house, I was literally 5 feet away from them for months on end and got to watch the whole process. Woodpeckers fly in a charming scalloped pattern, and I watched with a smile as this pair visited all the neighboring trees and returned to our palm tree as the days turned into months. They saved enough food for an army of woodpeckers, but there was only two of them that winter.
Woodpeckers put in long days. We worked out a truce thanks to a lot of socks that I threw at them from the balcony over that first month, and now they stick to their tree and don’t peck on the house at 6 am. Two years later, they now have a small family flock doing the same thing, the palm tree is chock full of acorns, and none of them are pecking on the house; so somehow the original pair taught their chicks to stick to their tree.
Back to pottery….charmed as I was by the woodpecker family, I did a series of birds cups to see how to get intense color and still be painterly. I simplified the woodpecker into color blocks and put 4-5 coats of underglaze on the woodpecker to reach an opaque stage. The palm tree is applied in a more painterly way like watercolor painting from a palette, and you can see how the effect is more subtle and brushed than the woodpecker. I’m posting the bisque and the glazed results so you can see how you would need to paint the greenware to get similar results when glazed.
