I recalled, once upon a time, taking a boat out to the Farallon Islands which lie about 30 miles from San Francisco and watching the pelicans cruise around there in the fog. As a lifelong painter of, among many other things, birds the benchmark set by @johnjamesaudubon is inescapable. The peculiarity of his depictions of the birds of America lies in the tension between the naturalistic and the theatrical; exquisitely painted from the posed specimens he 'collected' set in curious diorama. That always appealed to me since it draws attention that the paintings are just that; paintings and as such have a veracity which is absent in the astonishing photography of birds we're all familiar with since we simply do not encounter or see birds in that artificial/augmented way. To hold a bird in hand is to be astonished by their perfectly poised ephemerality and, in a way, my aim with my bird paintings is to depict that rapt moment. I don't go in for 'action shots' or gimmicks in my work for similar reasons: a lot goes into my images and much is taken out to try to reach a point where, as the old saw goes 'nothing can be added or taken out that would improve the image'. It's an exacting standard and one that I occasionally achieve. This one I think does. Figure and (back)ground is also a preoccupation and recently I've been trying to simplify my backgrounds yet this one demanded the full 'story'. What the pelican is bemused and astonished by is deliberately left ambiguous. It is lit as if upon a stage and that stage is rendered as if a backdrop. Again this is a deliberate device since the pelican is thus rendered an avatar; standing in for both all pelicans and us 'as pelican' - since we always seek to identify with players upon the stage. This is distinct from anthropomorphism, however, since in we become the ‘Pelican Astonished’.