This watercolor (14″ x 11″) by Sandra Kärcher was the first original painting I bought. She painted it on November 2005 and put it on sale on eBay shortly after that. I think there is not enough experimentation with different painting techniques and picture layout in wildlife art, but this piece is a welcome exception.

“Gone Fishing” (22″ x 39, acryl, 2004) by William Silvers is my favorite painting. It was also by far the most expensive and complicated purchase. But I’m nonetheless glad that I bought it since I believe that it is the best painting of a raccoon that has ever been created. William wrote the following lines about this acryl painting:

“The raccoon was aware of my presences when I took the reference photo but wasn’t about to stop looking for clams. At one point the boat I was in drifted close enough for me to touch him but he kept going as if I weren’t there.”

This untitled etching (7″ x 5″) was done by Tom Browning in 1977. It is an “original print” in the sense that it is a one of a kind piece which was given by the artist to a friend in Oregon.

I already watched David Coalburn‘s eBay account for a while when he put “Eyes that Stare Back at You” (12″ x 9″, oil, 2007) for sale.

“Don Diego on the Hunt” (20″ x 16″, watercolor, 2008) is a painting I commissioned from Misti Hope Wudtke. This watercolor is based on a reference photo I took while visiting the small zoo Waldzoo Offenbach in 2007. On my visit, I was able to play with Don Diego, whose nose was bitten off during a fight as a cub, and two other raccoons. Sadly, there was a huge fire at the zoo last month which caused a damage of around €60,000 which is an enormous amount for such a small zoo. I plan another visit there this summer and promised to make a generous donation.

“Dinner for Two” (14″ x 11″, watercolor, 2008) is another watercolor I commissioned from Misti Hope Wudtke. She was free to paint whatever she wanted, as long as a normal colored and a blonde raccoon were in it. Of course, I was very happy with the result.

However, Misti’s favorite wildlife subject are not raccoons, but birds. With its dark mood, “Thought and Memory” (16″ x 20″, watercolor, 2007) is a somewhat unusual piece for her. She wrote this about it:

“In Norse mythology, Odin (more correctly “Othinn”) had two ravens, Huginn (“Thought”) and Muninn (“Memory”). According to 13th-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, Othin would send Hugin and Munin out at dawn every day to fly over the world, and they’d return in the evening and relate to the god any noteworthy bits of news that they’d seen.

Although this painting originally had nothing to do with anything Norse, I thought the ravens’ names made a good title for this piece.

Yeah I know…there are five ravens in the picture…don’t know which two are Thought and Memory, though….”

Misti also created a good amount of watercolor paintings depicting songbirds that infiltrated her backyard, for example “November” (16″ x 20″, watercolor, 2007). She wrote about this piece:

“I’ve always been fond of blue jays (which are native to my home state of Wisconsin)—loud, obnoxious beasts that they sometimes are. I’ve had a good number of them lurking around my bird feeder in the last month or so; they always seem to come out in force when the weather gets cold.

The inspiration for the setting of this painting is the “back field” of our 27-acre woods, where my family used to have a garden. Everything’s quite dilapidated now—including the fence posts—and while it looks rather sad sometimes in the dim, golden-hued stillness of a November evening, it sure makes for great painting inspiration.

The background just turned out as a rather abstract mélange of dusky colors, but my brother, sister and sister-in-law seem to think it looks like northern lights. That wasn’t the intention, but I suppose “abstract” can be whatever the observer wants it to be, right? ”

“The Blizzard” (8″ x 10″, watercolor, 2007) is another watercolor by Misti of a songbird during winter, a black-capped chickadee among some jack pine branches to be precise. Misti was very happy the way this painting turned out:

“I used to make paintings in this style (that is, set on a cold, grey, snowy winter day) all the time, but I hadn’t made one in ages (that is, in about ten years), so I thought I’d try my hand at it again. I figured out a little better technique for creating random “snow” than I used to have, and I really like the way it turned out. In fact, I really really like the way it turned out.”

The thing I like the most about “Wood Ducks” (14″ x 11″, watercolor, 2007) is the background with its life-like branches and the vibrant colors of their leaves. When I commissioned “Don Diego on the Hunt”, I asked Misti to draw a similar background.