Price range: $179.00 through $225.00
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.
An Australian Barn Owl in flowing ink and sepia watercolour, silent wings caught above the sleeping bush.
There is a moment just after dusk when the bush around Dayboro goes quiet, and that is when the barn owl appears. No wingbeat, no warning, just a pale shape sliding between the trees. ‘Colours in the Night’ holds that moment on paper. The owl sits on a branch, alert but unhurried, its heart-shaped face turned toward something only it can hear. I wanted the drawing to feel like an encounter rather than a portrait, the kind of sighting that makes you stop on the verandah and hold your breath until it moves on.
The technique follows the bird. The facial disc is drawn in fine, patient linework, because that face is the owl’s instrument, a dish of feathers that funnels the faintest rustle of a mouse into its ears. Everything else loosens from there. Sepia washes bleed into the chest and wing feathers the way soft light bleeds into shadow, and ink splatters scatter outward like leaf litter kicked up in a landing. The contrast is deliberate. Precision where the owl concentrates, movement where the night takes over. Look closely and you can trace individual barbs on the facial rim; step back and the whole bird seems to be settling onto the branch in front of you.
I drew this piece at night in my Dayboro studio, working while the real owls were out hunting across the paddocks. Barn owls have haunted this valley far longer than the farmhouses have, and locals still tell you a screech overhead on a dark drive home is something you never forget. This drawing belongs to the Nocturnal Collection for exactly that reason. It is a record of the shift change in the Australian bush, the hour when the daytime birds fall silent and the pale sentinel takes over the sky.
Colours in the Night – 1 majestic Australian Barn owl
