Some Okay Birds is a record of every bird I went out of my way to see in a year. What it's actually about is how loving someone can crack open the world.

My ex-wife saw nature in a way I hadn't. Watching her see it made me want to see it too, and that pulled me out of a monkish life of uninterrupted digital work and into fields and trees with a sketchbook. The birds became mine. The passion became mine. The book is a document of that discovery.

I set it aside during the divorce. Came back to it afterward and found I still loved it enough to make a second edition. Things that belonged to a relationship also belong to you too.

The discipline was simple: when a conversation about a bird happened, draw it. Field sketchbook when possible, reference when not. The subjects were mostly chosen from native Floridian birds, the ones I was visiting personally. The delight came from branching out into interesting birds I'd never see unless I took flights all over the world.

What the practice actually required was learning to be still. To sit with a subject long enough to understand its characteristics without resorting to symbols. This was new territory; I'd built a life of continuous digital work, indoors, heads-down. Birds pulled me outside and slowed me down. That's the real subject of the book underneath the ornithology.

All of the finished pieces are digital, but the process runs through the sketchbook: analog studies and field drawings that fed back into each painting. The same embodied practice used in physical media, underneath every image.

My ex's favorite birds make up a significant portion of the first edition's roster. But the end of that relationship didn't end the process.

On a work trip to California I started seeing Scrub Jays everywhere. Not the Florida native one I had made countless studies of, but a sibling: the California Scrub Jay, shaped by a different coast. I sketched as many as I could while I was there. When I came home to Florida, I finished the painting.

That's when I understood that my love for birds was mine. Not borrowed, not learned by proximity to someone else's passion. Mine.

The California Scrub Jay isn't in the first edition and it's also the reason there's a second one.

The first edition was produced through Blurb as a coffee table layflat: gorgeous production, but wide in a way that left some compositions feeling smaller than the work deserved. The format constrained the birds. The second edition moved to a larger format to give them room.

The editorial changes were more significant than the format change.

The first edition carried personal anecdotes: stories from the life I'd had while making it, opinions about the birds, the texture of a specific time and relationship. Cutting that material for the second edition was hard. But the work stood on its own. Countless hours of field sketching had gone into each piece; the paintings didn't need the stories around them to justify themselves.

What remained was the bird, the art, the vernacular name, the Latin name below it. Clean.

My story felt much less important than the work by then and that turned out to be the right call.

I set Some Okay Birds aside when my marriage ended. I believed the work was so bound to that relationship that losing one meant burying the other.

And life showed me again: that's not how art works.

Time passed. I changed. My feelings about the work's worthiness recovered before I did. What I found when I came back to it was that the true value was in the hours spent learning to love the outdoors, to sit still with a subject, to find my place in the great web of life.