Don Richard Eckelberry (1921 – 2001)

My first impression of Eckelberry’s work was based on his illustrations in the two volume Audubon Bird Guide written by Richard Pough and published in 1946. Unlike Peterson, Eckleberry portrayed the birds in various natural poses. When I eventually came across the book I was not yet knowledgeable enough to appreciate Eckelberry’s artistic genius and depth of understanding of bird anatomy and behavior. That changed dramatically by 1957, with the publication of the one volume Audubon Western bird Guide: Land, Water and Game Birds of Western North America from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. I was then in my teens and knew far more about the appearance of birds. Also, Eckelberry had honed his skill to as close to perfection as possible. Like Fuertes he got to the “essence” of the species, and while still definitely “illustrative”, with relatively neutral lighting and perfectly aligned typical plumage and so on, there was a fidelity to the wonderful form of birds that made them so attractive to me. I not only favorably re-evaluated the earlier work, but I eagerly sought out all other examples of his art. One thing that Eckelberry did that I probably did not fully appreciate during the time span covered here, but which nevertheless had to influence my own approach to painting birds at least subconsciously, was to reduce detail, showing the birds as we tend to see them with the naked eye or through binoculars at a distance. In this approach the angle at which any part of the bird is viewed influences the tone of it, and shading matters. Texture is more implied than graphically designated in micro-detail, and form becomes all important. While all the bird artists can, as can I, produce less than their best at times, Eckelberry is in the top four or five of my favorite artists of my youth, and among the six or seven whose work most influenced me.  It helped, of course, that Eckleberry often portrayed neotropical species, at a time when it was still a challenge to find illustrations of birds not native to North America or to Britain and Europe. Terry Shortt, whose pen and ink drawings are in the western guide, along with Eckleberry’s superb color illustrations and a few very elegant scratchboard drawings of his own, urged me to contact Eckleberry. To my regret, I never did.