From the Oil Painter's Journal:

An Audience of One
It's great when animals treat you like part of the surroundings. You are deep in concentration and an hour into it you realize that there are wild creatures nearby and they don't notice you. Like the time when a big black crow landed on Hillary's straw hat. They both looked at each other at the same time and in the scuffle the bird flew off.

This composition was started without ducks in sight but anticipating that they would come back to their home base on the float. I like to block in the whole painting before I start to add people or animals (because of color relativity, another subject) and after I was well underway I noticed this duck at lower left standing on one foot on the dock with his beak tucked into his feathers. He looked asleep but I noticed his one tiny eye staring at me. Over the course of the session he moved a little and, grabbing the opportunity, became the other two ducks on the dock as well. In each case his good eye, ever so subtly, was trained on me.

©2006 DOUG RUGH. Neither text nor artwork may be reproduced without permission.