Touchdown Dance at Willcox Playa

Touchdown Dance at Willcox Playa (Pastel by Mikaela Quinn)

In my current exhibit at The Drawing Studio Gallery, one of my pieces is a pastel of a sandhill crane landing in the Whitewater Draw at Willcox Playa in southern Arizona. – less than a 2-hour drive from where I live in Tucson. 

Sandhill cranes spend their summers in northern Siberia and Alaska, down to the edge of the Arctic Sea.  Then in the fall, they migrate southward into America – to the lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin and down the Hudson Bay to Florida and Georgia.  Some head west and winter in Texas, California, Mexico, New Mexico – and in southeast Arizona at the edge of the Willcox Playa.  This is an ancient lake that’s dry most of the year, and surrounded by stacked layers of apricot sandstone cliffs as old as the crane’s lineage.

The eminent ornithologist Paul Johnsgard once said: “Cranes are among the oldest of living bird groups, and the sandhill crane in particular is the oldest currently existing bird species.”  Indeed.  Let’s respect our elders!

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Fossil remains of sandhill cranes have been found that date back nine million years. Granted, that’s some 55 million years after the last pterodactyls disappeared, but, as Johnsgard notes, the earliest ancestors of humankind were but small creatures resembling shrews when sandhill cranes were first winging their way across the sky, a fact of longevity that merits respect of itself.”

When they arrive over the Willcox Playa, the sandhill cranes make a raucous sound as hundreds of them swoop down from the sky and land all over the designated wildlife area. It’s an awesome experience to watch.

Some of them look like they’re performing a dance when they land and fold in their 7-foot wingspan, as I’ve portrayed in my painting.  Hence the painting’s title: Touchdown Dance at Willcox Playa.  They also do a beautiful ritual dance when they mate – and these tall, graceful birds mate for life.

In my painting, there are some “art things” going on as well as connecting with respect and age.

I intentionally used a rectangular tetrad color scheme of two pairs of complementary tertiary colors from the color wheel: Red-Orange and Blue-Green, and Yellow-Orange and Blue-Violet.  The only colors used in this painting are those four hues, and the tones, tints and shades of those hues.  I didn’t use white (except for a final soft touch on his cheek) or black – the very pale color throughout is predominately a Sennelier soft pastel in a tint of Blue-Green or pale Yellow-Orange.  The “grey” was achieved by using a very pale tint of Blue-Violet or a combination of pale Blue-Green and Red-Orange to create the darker grays.

The composition also expresses a sense of movement and tension, which helps to illustrate the crane’s expressive dancing in the very moment he lands on the water.  The tension and movement in the 2-D painting comes to life because the diagonal lines along his wings intersect and clash with each other – creating tension and movement within the composition.

If you want to know more about sandhill cranes, ChristyYuncker has a great photojournalism site on cranes in Alaska - http://www.christyyuncker.com/ - along with lectures on how birds think and why they dance.  Fascinating stuff!

The Wild Bird Store in Tucson had an interesting article in one of their newsletters by Jon Friedman, titled: “Wintering Sandhill Cranes in Southern Arizona.”

And, if you want to see these birds in action for yourself, check out Wings Over Willcox - the next migration landing Anniversary Festival is planned for January 15-16, 2014.  It’s quite an event!

Mikaela