I didn’t set out to paint deer.

I set out to find a way to bring a little more realism into my abstract work without losing the things I love most about abstraction: layers, imperfect marks, veils of color, things disappearing and reappearing, and the feeling that a painting has a history beneath its surface. The deer just happened to be standing outside my window.

At our home in Bella Vista, Arkansas, a herd of about 25 deer visits our property every day. I’ve become so fascinated by them that I journal their activity: who arrives, who travels together, when someone disappears for a while, when they return, and how the relationships within the herd seem to change over time. And I photograph them constantly. At last count, I had somewhere around 1,600 photographs.

After watching them day after day, they stop looking like simply deer. I recognize individuals by their markings and faces, the shape of their antlers, their behavior, and even by which other deer they tend to travel with. I recognize the mothers and their fawns. I know which does usually arrive together. There are bucks I can identify from a distance simply by their antlers or the way they carry themselves. They aren’t pets. They are completely wild. But they are familiar.And somewhere in all that watching, I realized I wanted to paint them. That became the beginning of a new series: Between Stillness and Flight: Portraits of a Whitetail Herd.

Starting with The General

For the first painting in the series, I chose The General, the largest buck who visits our property. That distinction mattered to me. I wasn’t searching through photographs for an interesting deer to paint. I was choosing an animal I knew. The General is magnificent. His size and antlers give him an unmistakable presence, and I wanted the painting to retain some of that majesty. But that isn’t the only reason I chose him.

For all his stature within the herd, there is also a tolerance about him that I’ve come to love. I’ve watched him interact with deer of lesser standing with a gentleness, sometimes even a sweetness, that seems almost at odds with his imposing appearance.

I wanted both things in the painting. Strength without aggression. Presence without hardness. I began with a loose charcoal drawing on a 30 × 60 inch canvas. I wasn’t interested in making a perfect rendering of him. In fact, I wanted almost the opposite.

The drawing was scaffolding. 

From the beginning, the plan was to let parts of The General disappear beneath paint, ink, collage and translucent layers, then redraw selected pieces later. A jaw might shift slightly. An antler might return in white instead of charcoal. One contour could overlap another. I wanted evidence of all those decisions to remain. Rather than correcting the slight misregistration between layers, I embraced it. The repeated lines became a record of looking at the same animal again and again.

Losing The General

Then I started covering him up. Acrylic washes, iron oxides, raw umber, warm earth colors, greys, ink, tissue-thin veils and areas of nearly opaque white moved across the canvas. Sometimes The General was obvious. Sometimes he nearly disappeared. That push and pull became the most interesting part of the painting.

I added color near the figure rather than simply filling him in. Warm rusts and ochres began talking to cooler blue-greys and aquas. White lines appeared over earlier dark ones. Ink ran where gravity decided it should run.

The painting became less about putting a deer onto an abstract background and more about allowing the animal and the abstraction to become inseparable.

The Eye

The eye was different. When I look at a deer, their eyes are where I see their soul. Their beauty is there. Their life is there. There is an alertness and vulnerability in them that I find incredibly moving. You can look at the enormous antlers of a buck like The General and see his power, but when you look into his eye, you see the living animal beneath all of it. So I knew the eye couldn't simply dissolve into the painting.

While much of The General remained loose, fragmented and partially obscured, I allowed the eye to become more resolved. It became the place where abstraction stopped for just a moment. The antlers might tell you that he is magnificent. The eye tells you that he is alive. 

Knowing When to Stop

I expected this painting to have many more layers. That was the plan. But paintings are notoriously unimpressed by plans. As the final layers began to settle, I realized that the looseness I had been trying so hard to protect was already there. The fragments connected without becoming overly explained. The eye had presence. The mouth and muzzle appeared and disappeared. The antlers dissolved into the surrounding marks.

Adding more simply because I had planned to add more would have risked burying the very thing I had been trying to find. So I stopped. That may have been the most important decision in the entire painting.

Between Stillness and Flight

Living alongside this herd has made me aware of something I hadn't expected. Deer make you pay attention. Their lives can be harsh. They are watchful and easily startled. There is hierarchy within the herd, and they can be surprisingly hard on one another.

And yet there is also extraordinary beauty and grace. There are moments of playfulness and joy. There is gentleness. And there seems to be an understanding within the herd that the fawns are something different, something to be watched over and carried forward.

Perhaps that's part of what keeps me watching. They can be completely still one moment, listening and taking in everything around them, and gone the next. When I'm watching them, I find myself doing the same thing.

I stop.

Whatever I was thinking about before disappears for a moment. I'm simply there, watching another living creature move through the world.

That feeling became the name of this series: Between Stillness and Flight.

These paintings are portraits, but not in the traditional sense. I don't want to describe every edge or capture every detail. I want the animals to emerge and disappear, just as they do outside my window. A line may be lost and then found again. A body may dissolve into color. An antler may become little more than a suggestion.

But the animal remains. And somewhere between stillness and flight, if I get it right, perhaps you can feel that life too.