In the mid-1980s when Stephen Jesic was photographing the vast landscape on a trip through Mount Isa, a speck in the distance caught his eye. It was a wedge-tailed eagle riding the thermals.
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"Even though it was so far away, it was only a little dot in the sky in the stark outback, that moment planted the seed for the painting," Jesic says.
At that stage in his artistic career, Jesic was gravitating from still life genre to painting wildlife, with a particular interest in showing birds in their natural environments.
The eagle he saw that day was too distant to catch by photography, instead Jesic absorbed the majesty of that fleeting moment.
That distant scene never became a distant memory, though. Even as his career as a wildlife artist took off internationally and commissions rolled in, Jesic didn't lose the urge to depict that moment from a bird's eye perspective.
He continued to seek out opportunities to observe wedge-tailed eagles, spending hours photographing them at sanctuaries and zoos and noting the way their wings moved and positioned mid-flight.
After the loss of his wife Bernadette, Jesic resolved to make finishing the work his top priority. It was her wish that he continue growing as an international artist, and this was the mightiest task on his list.
Jesic is now considered the world's top wildlife painter, winning a string of major awards in the past decade. His work, which has been exhibited by Sotheby's, is acclaimed for showing animals as individuals in their natural habitats as well as depicting species with scientific accuracy.
To research his most awarded work, Morning Reflections, of a Scarlet Macaw, Jesic spent four days sitting inside an aviary.
"It was absolutely glorious," he says. "But I had to be careful because macaws crack macadamia nuts like they're peanuts."
He then immersed himself in "a beautiful garden of proper species of South American plants" to get the setting right.
Monarchs of the Sky, his painting which brings that long-distant moment into view, sold before it was even quite finished, fetching the highest price ever achieved for a painting of a living artist at the Hunter Valley's Morpeth Gallery, where one exhibition wing is dedicated to wildlife art.
It has been bought by a Hunter Valley couple.
Trevor Richards, owner of the gallery, says there has been much stronger demand for realistic images of the natural world over the past two years.
"Many paintings have been selling before they are even hung on the gallery wall," Richards says.
"Customers want it, the artists have not been able to keep up."
Speed is not the world of the wildlife artist. Jesic, says Richards, "is one pedantic painter".
"It takes him so long to do a painting, every square millimetre must be faultless, even the glaze," Richards says. "You have no idea the lengths he goes to making sure it is flawless."
Jesic spent months just on the design phase of the 1.1m x 2m work, pulling together compositional concepts from the thousands of photographs he took.
He refined his composition using digital design tools before committing to paint, with 1000-plus easel hours needed to capture the detail that is his trademark.
Jesic follows a traditional compositional structure, with the main subject at mid-distance and finely rendered accounts of the landscape in both the foreground and the background.
Jesic came back to his early life connection with art after working many years as a biomedical research engineer - "technical was my niche".
He carried that precision through into art, training in old master painting techniques in alignment with the Art Renewal Center, based in the US, which seeks to lead "the revival of realism in the visual arts . . . creations that communicate some aspect of our shared humanity with beauty, poetry, grace".
Monarchs of the Sky will be on display throughout the long weekend at Morpeth Gallery's annual Feathers and Fur wildlife art show. Jesic will be attending to demonstrate his techniques.
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