We always have Jay’s around our summer treehouse. The adult Steller's Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) is sleek and bold with a striking navy-black crested head fading into a bright blue body. They will tussle over food with squirrels and their loud brash caw echoes in the forest. They are very curious and most summers one will sneak in the cabin too far and have to be coaxed to the exit or captured and released. Newly fledged young jays are sweetly awkward balls of soft gray and light blue fluff that sticks out at odd angles when their feathers begin to change. In June of 2023, these siblings took to resting in the hemlock or on our porch for weeks as they waited for their feathers to transition and gained confidence. They were quite calm and unruffled when I was out in the porch garden and began to feel like the cabin mascots that summer so I was able to capture some close photos of them.

In July, I created Young Jays by combining some of their poses and staging them in the hemlock they often liked to sit in. All the jays seem to like the view from that tree but it is too awkward to photograph from the cabin and otherwise impossible without a drone. We can see the Chilkat mountains and I took some liberties with them to best suit the relationships in the rest of the painting. In my sketchbook that spring and summer, I was working on: yellow and purple combinations without mixing, mixing a variety of warm and cool greens, and playing with brush textures. In August, little kombucha shop in downtown Juneau hosted a show of several of my original paintings including this one.

Young Jays

Huckleberry Chickadee

Maru