Born and raised in California, Oakland-based artist Lisa Sindorf has a lifelong fascination with the wildlife
and landscapes of her home state. Her interest in drawing birds began when she took a wildlife taxonomy class in
college and found that the best way to truly know the study specimens was to draw them. Observing the details
with the intense scrutiny needed to reproduce them on paper resulted in a similarly intense memory of their
appearance. Though she has been teaching herself to draw for years, she has only recently begun experimenting
with an all-digital creation process. Drawing with this technology led to the emergence of her current style,
which forgoes detail in favor of essential forms.
When identifying birds in the field, we are seldom lucky enough to study them in great detail. A distant silhouette or a flash of white wing bars may be the only clues we have for identification; yet remarkably, these field marks are often so unique that we don't need to see more (though we often want to!). Lisa Sindorf's work is a tribute to these most fundamental elements of birdwatching. Using simplified shapes, limited colors, and an all-digital creation process, she abstracts her birds, making them appear more as we remember them from the brief glimpses they occasionally grant us. As Charley Harper once said, "I never count the feathers in the wings; I just count the wings."