Price range: $125.00 through $135.00
This artwork is on display at LRB Retreat & Private Gallery Experience.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
Available to buy now
Two Australian Magpies mid-carol in expressive original ink, loose brushwork capturing the voice of the bush.
Anyone who has stood in an Australian backyard at first light knows the sound. That rich, warbling carol of a magpie, part flute and part conversation, rolling across the paddocks before the day has properly started. Sweet Sounds of Nature holds that moment still. The larger of the two magpies throws its head right back, beak open to the sky, every feather committed to the song. Behind it, a smaller companion perches quietly, listening the way magpies do before they answer.
The work is drawn in black ink on white paper, and the medium does a lot of the singing here. Loose, gestural brushstrokes follow the energy of the bird rather than its outline, so the carolling magpie seems caught mid-note rather than posed. Flecks and splatters of ink scatter around the pair like notes shaken loose from the song itself. Nothing is overworked. Each stroke was laid down quickly and left alone, which is what gives the piece its sense of movement, the feeling that if you look away the bird will finish its phrase and hop to another branch.
There is a quiet story in the pairing too. Magpies carol to claim their patch, but they also sing together, in duets and family choruses that carry for hundreds of metres. One bird in full voice and one listening is how most of those conversations actually start. Drawn in an Australian studio by an artist who hears these birds every morning, the sketch is less a portrait of two magpies than a portrait of a sound, the one that tells you where you are before you have even opened your eyes.
As an original ink work, this is the only one of its kind. It comes framed and ready to hang, sized to sit comfortably in a hallway, study or kitchen, anywhere you would be glad of a reminder to stop and listen. For collectors of Australian wildlife art it offers something the glossier prints rarely do: the immediacy of real ink meeting real paper, decisions made in seconds and left honest on the page. The white space around the birds is deliberate. It gives the song somewhere to go.
Sweet Sounds of Nature
This artwork is on display at LRB Retreat & Private Gallery Experience.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
