Toucan in the Jungle

Finding Form in the Foliage

When working on the piece captured in Toucan in the Jungle, my primary interest lay in balancing the bird’s structure against the looser, organic movement of its environment. A toucan carries an inherent graphic quality—the massive beak, the distinct mask around the eye—which can easily dominate a composition if handled too rigidly.

To counter this, I chose to work with loose, layered acrylic marks, letting the background build organically. The challenge was to make the bird feel fully integrated into the jungle rather than just sitting atop it. You can see hints of the turquoise and lime greens of the canopy bleeding directly into the shadows of the feathers, while the bright orange and yellow of the beak find echoes in the lower left blooms.

The heavy, dark outlines were applied with a fluid but deliberate hand. They aren’t meant to perfectly contain the colour, but rather to ground the form amongst the fractured light and swift brushstrokes. By leaving parts of the underpainting exposed, the surface retains a sense of immediacy, capturing a fleeting observation rather than a static study.