A masterpiece from the 2008 Master Wildlife Artist

My friend Marcia Theel, associate director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum here in Wisconsin, sent me a sure sign of spring earlier this week. She let me know that James Morgan, the artist who painted the Cinnamon Teals above, has been named as the museum’s 2008 Master Wildlife Artist.

Those of you who are art lovers as well as birdwatchers probably already know that it’s Marcia’s charming museum that organizes the annual exhibition known as Birds in Art, and that Birds in Art showcases only artists who showcase birds in their work.

This year’s exhibition, on view between September 6 and November 9 (here’s a Google map), will feature more than 125 original bird-inspired paintings, sculptures, and graphics from around the world, including a dozen paintings and drawings by Morgan, who hails from Utah.

He will become the museum’s 30th Master Artist, adding his name to a list of previous honorees that reads like a who's-who of acclaimed wildlife artists: Owen Gromme, George Miksch Sutton, Roger Tory Peterson, Don Eckelberry, Robert Bateman, Lars Jonsson, and so many others. We wrote about the 2006 Master Artist, the printmaker Andrea Rich, in our October 2006 issue. --C.H.