My hummingbirds are not always angelic...

...sometimes they perch with an undeniably honked-off and irritable look in their eyes defying any other humming-type bird to venture forth and try...just try...to get a sip of the sweet, sweet nectar...

Painting 172. Female Ruby-throated Hummingbird Guarding the Nectar

Watercolor

Rough Pencil sketch from my sketchbook of a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird

...I drew this sketch in the car while waiting for Matty. My ref was a poor-quality printout of a photo I took a couple of years ago. As a result, I couldn't see any feather detail, so I totally made up the feather configuration, choosing "poetic license" to give the feel of detail. Since this little female had such a fierce look in her eyes...and she was "poetic" in her own way, I thought D. H. Lawrence's poem "Humming-bird," where he depicts a hummingbird at the dawn of creation as a "jabbing, terrifying monster," was the perfect fit. When I watch our hummingbirds fight viciously over their food source in the summer, I totally get his image...

Humming-bird

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.

by D. H. Lawrence

(excerpted from "The Little Big Book of Birds," by Tabori and Fried -- originally from "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," 1923)

...this is painting 72 in this year's 100 painting challenge...painting 172 in my 5 year, 500 painting challenge.