Noisy Pitta Waiting

The Noisy Pitta is a denizen of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area of North Queensland, Australia. It has a very distinctive and loud call that resembles 'walk to work, walk to work' but only during the breeding season. Otherwise, they are very quiet. These birds are only found in wet tropical or subtropical rainforest, monsoon or dense Eucalypt forests and are very cryptic, so they are little-seen but definitely heard. They forage the floor of the forest looking for juicy food such as snails which they break open with a rock or anvil.
My method for each painting is to first sketch a few compositions in pencil. I carefully choose the best composition. When laying down paint I sometimes paint a ground colour in acrylic paint such as red ochre or salmon colour to provide a tint for the background. Then I sketch a line drawing with charcoal onto the tinted surface. I block out the shapes, continuing with acrylic paint. By this time, I may have painted over the canvas dozens of time before applying oil paint. By the time I finish each painting, it is possible that I have mixed millions of colours. This I know because of software that analyses the number of colours it detects on the photographs of the paintings I take for marketing.

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Pam Schultz is an award-winning representational fine artist. Her paintings are in the collection of national and international patrons. “My appreciation of art began at home in Melbourne, where I was fascinated by my grandmother’s oil paintings hanging on the walls. I started drawing earnestly around eight years old. I excelled at art in school and by grade 12, I was enrolled in a Diploma of Art at Caufield Institute of Technology (now Monash University). My first artistic job was a textile artist at a clothing factory in Melbourne. I designed textile patterns and took the illustrations overseas to England where I was based for three years. I travelled around Europe, West Asia and America visiting art galleries, stately homes and cathedrals. In London, I worked for an animation studio where I created illustrations for commercials. Back in Australia, I became enthralled by the tropical landscapes in North Queensland and became involved in lobbying for their protection through my art. Influenced by anthropology studies at university, I began to paint portraits in 2003. Then I began to choose people who were conservation ecologists as this theme suited my passion as one who aimed for the same goal. I worked in the field of natural resource management following the achievement of a PhD in Environmental Science. Amongst other recent commendations, I won first prize in 2019 for “The Ethnobotonist” in the competition Artists of the North in Cairns. In 2020, I received a high commendation for “Grasswren Country Laid Down” at the Cairns Regional Gallery.”