I’ve finally have my new studio up and running and it is everything I’ve ever wanted. With a 4 ft x 8 ft board on one wall, it has adjacent shelves for stores and paints plus an area for rolled, archived canvases. The first image is a commission from my husband. A long thin painting of some unusual birds.

The thick-billed seedfinches are sweet and friendly black birds that live in the forest and often hide from our view. After many walks and exploratory hikes to find them, I came back disappointed. Then having started to paint the mother colour we noticed a birds’ nest being built right above our front door. Knowing that the birds would get constantly disturbed by noise, cars and visitors we had imagined that they would leave to find a quieter spot. But they stayed. We saw that the parent bird was a thick-billed seedfinch. An amazing act of grace that they had come to find us. The mother finch stayed sitting on the nest for weeks until we were sure that the eggs must have hatched or gone bad, until one morning my husband took a stepladder near the nest to investigate. Inside he told me there were some dead birds. Horrified I also took a look and saw that one of the birds on the top layer was breathing slowly. Later that day they sat up making wheezing noises and the next day four baby birds were sitting in a cute bunch in the nest being occasionally fed by their parent. Now growing and sitting on twigs close to the nest we see them becoming stronger each day.

Their call is a short, sweet keeoo. The thick bill is the same size as their head and they look cute. So the painting now has a nest in the branches of a tree and attentive seedfinches close by.