Brian K. Wheeler Wildlife, especially birds, have captivated Brian since he was a young child in Washington and Iowa. He began drawing animals at a very young age and started painting watercolors of wildlife at 12 years old. John James Audubon’s stylized life-sized renditions of birds and John Fenwick Lansdowne’s authentic vignette portraits of birds greatly influenced the young artist. At 16, and having moved to Michigan, he concentrated on painting life-sized portraits of North American birds. Since then, Brian has produced hundreds of life-sized paintings of birds. Brian embarked on an intense self-taught bird anatomy program upon graduating from high school in 1973. He dissected and prepared large numbers of bird specimens for museums and nature centers in Michigan and, later, at Yale University’s Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. The study of bird anatomy provides the basis for the authenticity in his paintings and book illustrations. A formal art education was obtained at Paier College of Art, Hamden, Connecticut from 1975 to 1978. During this period, Brian experimented with different mediums but found that gouache, an opaque watercolor, best suited his methodology in bird painting. Paintings are done in a clean vignette style with limited background. This produces poignant works with positive and negative space. Though backgrounds are limited, they are an integral part of the design, enhanced by exquisite life-like detail. Background props are either collected fresh or photographed for later use. Early paintings were done on white watercolor paper. Since the mid-1980s, all paintings have been done on museum quality various-colored 100% acid-free matting boards. These colored surfaces create a distinct mood accentuating his vignette-style. Several fine art galleries have represented Brian since the late 1970s. In 1977, at age 22, he painted a scenic full background 4’ x 5’ oil painting of life-sized extinct Passenger Pigeons; it is on permanent display at the Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, Michigan. Brian’s intrigue and study of raptors increased as time went on, unraveling their poorly understood plumage variations. His raptor studies have taken him on countless trips throughout the United States, including Alaska, and to Mexico. To gain ready access to the highly variable-plumaged western Buteos, he moved to Colorado in 1986. To enhance his studies, he began photographing birds in the early 1980s. Photography began as a reference tool for paintings but, in time, it eventually also became an art form itself. He has been published in various books, calendars, magazines, and puzzles. He is coauthor and illustrator of Hawks of North America, Houghton Mifflin (1987 [1st edition] and 2001 [2nd edition]); coauthor and photographer of A Photographic Guide to North American Raptors, Academic Press (1995) and by Princeton University Press (2003); author and photographer of Raptors of Eastern North America and Raptors of Western North America, Princeton University Press (2003). His latest set of books Birds of Prey of the East: a Field Guide and Birds of Prey of the West: A Field Guide, Princeton University Press, were released in the spring of 2018. Brian is the author and illustrator of these two highly innovative raptor guides. These books incorporate the most comprehensive distribution and plumage information on North American raptors. The illustrations (plates) utilize the attractive colored backgrounds used in his life-sized paintings.