Study of birds to be demonstrated at KVAL meeting
Guest demonstrator at the next Kishwaukee Valley Art League meeting will be DeKalb artist Peter Olson, who also is the assistant director of the Northern Illinois University Art Museum.
At the meeting, which will be held at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at the corner of Fourth and Locust streets in DeKalb, Olson plans to demonstrate colored pencil drawing and mixed-media collage.
Olson is a versatile artist who has worked in a variety of media although now he is primarily known for his focus on a single subject, the artistic portrayal of all kinds of birds. For his artwork, he works mainly from photographs although he loves to observe birds in their natural environments.
After completing his undergraduate study of art at Miami University of Ohio he went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking under David Driesbach at NIU, though his involvement with that medium has faded in recent years.
“Few surfaces have more inherent beauty to me than a carved block of wood,” Olson said in a news release.
Some of his prints are chiaroscuro woodcuts, in which the artist uses several shades of one color, allowing light and shadow to model the bird’s form, with each shade printed from a separate block of wood.
Now most of Olson’s small drawings are intimate portraits of individual bird species done in colored pencil, sometimes washes of gouache in the background.
“The collages developed from a mistake that becomes an artistic breakthrough,” he said in the release. What started as a simple drawing of a warbler evolved into an artistic exploration of the many ways to represent a bird in visual art.
Olson has participated in more than 150 solo and group shows, and has contributed illustrations for various books and journals. To view the variety of Olson’s work, visit www.peterolsonbirds.com.
Kishwaukee Valley Art League invites anyone in the community with an interest in the arts to attend the meeting. Coffee and refreshments will be served after the demonstration. KVAL is an nonprofit organization that meets monthly September-December and February-June.
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