Cooper’s Hawks are one of the most common raptors here in the Tucson area of the greater Sonoran Desert. I frequently see them around my neighborhood and even in my own garden, where they have learned to dive-bomb doves, deliberately driving them into our large walls of glass and then snatching the stunned birds from the ground. We have a large Eucalyptus tree in our front yard where the hawks sit and carefully disarticulate their kills, often leaving nothing behind but a severed head or pair of feet in our driveway. During an unusually large migration of American Robins one year, my next-door neighbor reported that a Cooper’s Hawk had driven nine Robins into his windows in a single day and flown off with each one of them, in turn, to feed her hungry offspring.

In this piece, I wanted to capture the grace and terrible beauty of this agile predator, but to show the kill in a tasteful way. Bleeding, as it does, into the abstract background, one hardly notices the dead dove from across the room, but upon closer inspection, the reality of the scene reveals itself.

This study is part of a series that is painted more loosely and directly than most of my work. The mixed media application harkens back to Covid, when I created well over one hundred small studies of birds and animals combining graphite, watercolor, acrylic, and colored pencil. These are much larger, and certainly more developed, versions of that style.