Albrecht Dürer Born - 1471-1528

'The Wing of a Blue Roller' is one such

example of his remarkable drawing ability. It

is a beautiful watercolour painting that

accurately captures the structure, texture

and shimmering colour of the bird's

feathers. He uses watercolour to delicately

blend the soft graduating colour of the

plumage and over paints linear detail with

gouache (an opaque watercolour) to pick

out the jagged edges of the feathers.

Albrecht Dürer was born in the city of Nuremberg, a lively cultural and commercial centre in 15th

century Germany. He was the third of eighteen children. Originally taught to draw by his father who

was a goldsmith, he seems to have inherited that craft's appreciation of fine detail. Although Dürer

became one of the greatest oil painters of the Northern Renaissance, he is equally famous for his

exquisite watercolours, engravings and woodcut prints.

Creatures were not generally considered to be appropriate subjects for serious art until the eighteenth

century when George Stubbs elevated the genre by the sheer quality of his work. Critics felt that the

painting of animals was simply a demonstration of technical skill, and as such did not aspire to the

creative vision of great art. Almost two centuries before, Albrecht Dürer was one of the first artists to

view animals as a subject worthy of attention and he demonstrates this across a range of watercolours

and prints that have become hugely popular and frequently reproduced.

Dürer was fascinated by nature as he believed that the study of the natural world

could reveal the fundamental truths he was seeking to discover through his art. He

wrote, "Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it.

Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses

or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.

‘’But life in nature manifests the

truth of these things…. Therefore

observe it diligently, go by it and do

not depart from nature arbitrarily,

imagining to find the better by

thyself, for thou wouldst be misled.

For, verily, “art” is embedded in

nature; he who can extract it has it’’

— Albrecht Durer

Durer’s woodcuts are even more

mind-blowing than his exquisite

watercolours. And there is so much

to learn from the process of making

woodcuts – not only drawing skills,

but also the process of working in

reverse, using negative space, and

trying to represent forms with

simple black and white. I think this is

a wonderful project, and continue to

be inspired by the people who

generate these ideas.

Hundreds of surviving drawings, letters, and diary entries document Dürer'stravels through Italy and the

Netherlands (1520–21), attesting to his insistently scientific perspective and demanding artistic

judgment.

The artist also cast a bold light on his own image through a number of striking self-portraits—drawn,

painted, and printed. They reveal an increasingly successful and self-assured master, eager to assert his

creative genius and inherent nobility, while still marked by a clear-eyed, often foreboding outlook. They

provide us with the cumulative portrait of an extraordinary Northern European artist whose epitaph

proclaimed: "Whatever was mortal in Albrecht Dürer lies beneath this mound."