Greg Oakley’s take on birds is a distinctive one. Inspired by the celebrated Victorian bird illustrator John Gould, Oakley has used his photography to create a series of hyper-real avian artworks, which seek to display the essence of a bird’s character. Oakley recently published a book of the series, titled Homage to the Bird, with colourful and distinctive depictions of native Australian and south-east Asian birds.
We spoke to Oakley to discover more about the artworks that appear in the book and the key role that photography plays in them.
Which path did you follow to becoming a photographer and illustrator?
I started out as a traditional artist and trained as such, becoming a graphic designer. I have always been interested in birds and nature, so about 15 years ago I started taking photographs of birds, using a Fujifilm digital camera that had a 5MB capacity. It was fun taking photographs of things I enjoyed looking at in the bush.
As time went by, I upgraded my cameras and got good at taking photographs of birds and being a bird photographer. About seven years ago, I decided to integrate an artistic element into what I was doing in my photography.
I consciously wanted to break away from being seen as purely a bird photographer and to become a bird artist, but in a digital format. I found this interesting because a lot of people were painting and drawing birds, but not really doing digital illustrations of them.
I had a pretty extensive library of, you can crop in quite tight on a bird and retain a fair bit of the detail.
