George Mikschi Sutton

When I was very young, I loved birds dearly, but I don’t remember being puzzled by them. 

The handsome ruffed grouse that came to our cabin in the woods, to drum every day on the sill of the big window in the living room came because it found that sill a good place for drumming.  Its drumming entertained me in a way that I find impossible to describe.  Every blessed thing it did on that windowsill gave me a feeling approaching ecstasy.

A few years later, I decided that the time had come for me to make good drawings.  I peddled them from door to door selling them at a penny apiece.  My favourite was of a prize rooster at a Nebraska State Fair, a drawing for which an a admiring passerby paid me a dime.

The very force which drives me, at times relentlessly, to do the best I can at drawing birds is Louis Agassiz Fuertes, whom I met and he commented that my drawings were coming along well. Fuertes himself gave me one of his old paint boxes- a treasure I was to take with me everywhere I went.  There is something mystical about that paint box.  Having it near me warmed my heart and gave me confidence.

A bird artist cannot and must not try to tell everything in a given drawing. He cannot show every feather.  It is representational.

George Mikschi Sutton was born in 1898, Bethany, Nebraska and died 1982 (wildlife artist)

Birds in Art, the Masters by Inga Brynildson & Woody Hagge