$79.00
1 in stock (can be backordered)
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 cockatoo lifts off a gum trunk while a kookaburra and lorikeets watch from the branches above, ink drawn in Queensland.
The gum trunk is the anchor of this piece. Everything else, the cockatoo’s spread wings, the kookaburra’s watchful stillness, the pair of lorikeets tucked onto a branch above, happens around it. Danielle B Latta worked this scene in ink, building the cockatoo’s feathers stroke by stroke until the wings seem to hold air rather than just describe it. That’s the moment the drawing catches: not the birds sitting still, but the cockatoo mid-lift, weight already shifting off the bark.
The setting is a stretch of Queensland bushland, the kind you’d walk past most afternoons without a second look until the birdlife starts up. A kookaburra doesn’t call in ink, but you can feel the pause before it might. The lorikeets sit close together on their branch, the sort of pair-bond you see constantly in the wild but rarely stop to notice. Latta’s line work leaves room for that quiet, dense where the cockatoo’s crest and wingtips need weight, loose and sketch-like around the kookaburra so it reads as glimpsed rather than posed.
Behind the birds, a muted watercolour wash stands in for the bush itself, gum leaves and dappled light rendered soft enough that they never compete with the ink lines in front. It’s a technique Latta returns to often: hard-edged detail on the subject, atmosphere held back to a whisper behind it. The effect is a piece that feels observed rather than composed, like a page from a field sketchbook rather than a studio setup.
This is the second piece in Latta’s Date in the Bush series, continuing her documentation of the birds that share the Queensland backyard and bushland she draws from. It sits somewhere between wildlife study and quiet portrait, three birds who happen to be sharing a tree, caught in the seconds before one of them moves on.
Date in the Bush 2 – Kookaburra, Lorikeet and Cockatoo
