Price range: $315.00 through $349.00
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
A red tailed black cockatoo in bold ink and grey wash, with one fierce flash of red. Drawn by hand in Dayboro.
Anyone who has stood under a stand of eucalypts while red tailed black cockatoos work the seed pods knows the feeling. You hear them first, that creaking metallic call rolling down the valley, then a slow black shape crosses the canopy on deep, unhurried wingbeats. Light My Fire is my attempt to hold that presence on paper. The bird sits in profile, composed and watchful, while the ink around it refuses to keep still. Loose black brushstrokes build the weight of the body, splatter scatters across the page like chewed seed husks falling from a feeding tree, and one vivid flash of red burns in the tail. That red is the whole point of the piece. In the bush you see nothing but shadow until the bird banks or fans its tail, and suddenly there is fire in the canopy.
Ink is an honest medium and it gives no second chances. Every mark in this illustration was made once and left alone. I started with soft grey washes to set the ghost of the bird, letting the water do half the work, then committed the dark mass of the chest and wing with a loaded brush. The splatter is thrown, not placed, so each flick of the wrist carries a little risk. Where the grey wash thins, light seems to move through the feathers. Where the black pools, the bird takes on real weight. The red tail panel went in last, one deliberate note of colour against everything monochrome around it, and it changes the temperature of the whole page.
I am Danielle B Latta and I drew this piece in my studio at Dayboro, Queensland, where these cockatoos are neighbours rather than subjects. They pass over the ridge in small family groups most weeks, and their call has become part of the sound of home. Working from a place where the bird actually lives changes how you draw it. This is not a specimen study. It is a portrait of a local, made with the attention a local deserves. Light My Fire is an original, not a print, so the texture of the ink and the tooth of the paper are part of what hangs on your wall. It comes framed and ready to hang, and it sits just as well in a hallway as above a reading chair. Like the bird itself, it stays quiet until the light catches the red.
Light My Fire, majestic red tailed black cockatoo
