Giving a horse whinny

Returning to art, building niche, living slowly

Northern hawk owl. Copyright Catherine Brison Arnold, 2021. (fineliner, watercolor, colored pencil)

In January 2021 I’d fallen in love with a sound in the gentle nights in my Western bungalow neighborhood.

It was like a ghost horse, a spirit whinny — and I realized I wanted to draw it or whatever was producing it. 

The thing was, I hadn’t drawn since junior high. For years my identity had been a writer. I’d attend shows at museums and galleries and pore over children’s book and magazine illustrations, but I told myself to focus: I was a visual-minded writer, and that was all. 

The sound was a Western screech owl’s call, I later learned. My partner and I had seen and heard the larger great-horned owls several times the previous fall in our areas of Salt Lake City. We’d watch the tall raptors — with a name that means “to capture” in Latin — throatily hoot from tree branches as they prepared to hunt at dusk. Around then, I was realizing owls live a life outside our human ones that prompts folklore and visual images. Screech owls — large eyed, squat and square-faced little darlings with killer talons — also keep our neighborhoods safer from rodent and insect infestations and blend wonderfully into tree cavities for online “is it a knot or an owl?” visual features. Hunting at dusk, owls also suited my winter inclination to rise later and extend early dusks with walks. 

Learning about them opened my world in a pandemic time, and I wanted to draw something about that. Finding screech owl photos on my phone, I made a quick ballpoint pen sketch on a brown paper grocery bag and captioned it, “I give a horse whinny about you” — a play on “I give a hoot about you.” Sending it as a phone photo to several friends I hadn’t seen in a while and missed, I received some confused replies. 

But it was already happening: I was returning to drawing. I’d made something that looked like an animal that thrilled me. 

That winter I began posting my art about nature and household subjects on Instagram, finding an online community of people creating their own interpretations of the natural universe. They lived all over the globe, but I was especially interested to see how many British artists live in a world of nature response. They draw, illustrate, and cut linoleum pieces to print images of winter beach swimming, rainy forests and moors, bright summer days, and wildlife. I also found artists all over Asia, South America, Europe, and other continents.

I was excited to draw, but also to discover individuals around the world in a time of shutdown.

In my own art, I worked hard to render owls’ feathers or the areas where beaks joined avian faces. But I felt impatient to show more of my own style and mood, to draw more loosely. 

These days, I’m still working out a few areas of my style. I make loose sketches, illustrations, and comic influenced lines. 

The pandemic helped me find this point. I wanted to slow down to see my world, to draw and paint it — and observe others’ work. Locally and globally, it allowed me to find urban sketch groups that were gathering in small groups to draw and paint streets, neighborhoods, and parks.

This work also has shown me how to build work niches as a freelance writer and editor. Recently I was asked if I can produce writing for the architecture and design industry. Ever since my architectural engineer father gave me TinkerToys (not my favorite toy, admittedly) and pointed out bridges and other structures, I’ve noticed design and our built environment. With what I now realize was an interest in the ways design and structures form our neighborhoods, I’ve written about engineering, municipal solar, wastewater treatment, landscape architecture, and transit. So now I’m taking free online architecture classes and adjusting my resume to show an architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) background. 

Do you want to build or develop work niches or live more slowly?

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