Northern Cardinal in Red Osier Canvas Print

The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is one of the more common garden birds in southern Ontario, where I live, and yet was virtually unknown in Ontario prior to the start of the 20th Century. Before then it was thought of as a bird of the southeastern U.S. It has a wide distribution across temperate North America, including much of Mexico, west, in the south, as far as California, but missing through the entire northwestern and northern regions of the continent. I had planned to do this simple study of a male Northern Cardinal on a bare maple twig, but a few weeks ago I saw one on twig of red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) and found the contrast between the different shades of red on the cardinal and the more purplish-maroon reds of the dogwoods very interesting, and so changed my mind and showed my cardinal on the dogwood, the same bush, in fact, putting both in front of a softly blue sky. The painting is approximately 12 by 9 inches, approximately life-size, on har...