"Barred Owl"
Acrylic Gouache on Wood

18” x 24”
Prints available for purchase

Barred Owls are excellent at being invisible. They spend their days pressed against tree bark, feathers blending into the texture of the wood so completely that you can look directly at one and not see it unless it moves. This painting started as an attempt to capture exactly that—the owl almost hidden, discovered rather than displayed.

They’re one of the most common owls in the eastern United States, but common doesn’t mean easy to find. What they need is old trees. Large, mature trees with cavities big enough to nest in, in neighborhoods stable enough to have let those trees grow for decades. Greenbelt, Maryland—a planned New Deal community with an unusually intact tree canopy—turns out to be excellent habitat. There are Barred Owls in the pockets of forest around my neighborhood. I’ve heard them, I’ve found their feathers, but the closest I’ve gotten to actually seeing one is a few years ago when I managed to see one fluffy little owlet head.

I took these reference photos for this painting at the Annual Owl Moon Raptor Festival in Boyds, Maryland. I found out later through a chance meeting that the Owl’s name is Luna. She’s one of the Education Raptors with the Maryland Raptor Conservancy. She is nine years old, calm, patient, and apparently unbothered by adoring crowds. She is the reason this painting exists.

A note on the process: midway through this painting I hit a wall trying to accurately render the back feathers—barred owl reference photos almost always show the front. The back feathers have a semi-transparent quality that was throwing me off. I posted an in-progress photo on Reddit asking for help. The response was immediate and generous—ornithologists, taxidermists, wildlife rehabilitation experts, and owl enthusiasts from across the internet showed up with exactly what I needed. There are still really lovely corners of the internet that work the way the whole thing was supposed to.