Sometimes when you are working on an image you suddenly see something else in your mind's eye and you cannot settle until you get that image out into the world. This is exactly what happened when I started on the watercolour of the osprey. This was a relatively small image and I thought that it deserved to be larger and probably in acrylic or oil. Normally I don't like redoing a painting, but the image jumped in to my head that the bird needed to be attacking another sort of invader to its territory.
Ospreys are not quite the efficient fish snatching machines that we normally see them portrayed as being. I remember watching a number of ospreys patrolling the strand line of a beach that would once have been populated with nothing but random vegetation and the occasional meal that had washed up on the tide. Nowadays there is a lot more man made flotsam and this is what I imagined a desperate bird taking away; with to clean up or in the mistaken thought that it was prey (not a dead plant therefore fair game as food). There are also heavy overtones of the impact of humans on the natural world, but the juxtaposition of the two made an itch that needed to be scratched.
The title of this piece actually refers to the initial image being one of me playing with an idea after making the first painting. I was trying a different idea of how to paint and the image was not really that important. In my mind that sort of application of a skill to transposing an idea on to a page is more akin to a technician taking a design and making it. It still requires skill, but the end product is a replication not an original product that had never existed before. The second image is taken to an artistic level above the copied image to something that has a lot more depth and works on many different levels. That is my hypothesis of the difference between the artist and the artisan and we are all both at some point, but the art gives me a lot more pleasure for some reason.
