Sandhill Serenade

Artist: Pam Haunschild

Format: Acrylic on paper mounted on board, painted edges, natural wood float frame

Dimensions: Painting 16" x 20"; overall framed size 19" x 25" x 2"

Description:

Two sandhill cranes face off in the foreground of this piece, mid-courtship — wings flared, necks arched, caught in the elaborate, ritualized dance these birds perform each season. What's most interesting about the composition isn't the cranes themselves, though, it's where Pam Haunschild chose to put them. Rather than centering the dance, she pushes the birds off to one side, and the eye naturally follows a diagonal line up and out toward the mountains and moon beyond — the same way attention drifts when you're actually standing somewhere watching wildlife, rather than looking at a posed photograph. "This is a painting of two sandhill cranes engaged in their courtship dance," Haunschild says, "set in a marshy landscape" — but the real achievement here is how naturally the eye moves through an entirely abstracted, color-saturated scene, as if it were observing something true and unstaged in the wild.