Timothy as the Cerulean Warbler

Some birds you hear long before you see.

The Cerulean Warbler lives at the very top of the forest. A small song drifts down through the leaves, and you crane your neck, and you search, and there it is: a flash of blue no bigger than your thumb, the exact color of the sky behind it.

Timothy chose that bird.

And once he was wrapped in those blues, I understood why.

At Wild Zen

Timothy’s portrait came together at Wild Zen Yoga Fest.

Wild Zen is a festival where people come to move, breathe and play outside. Barefoot. Open. A little wild. It’s one of my favorite places to bring color, because people arrive already ready to soften.

Timothy is an artist, and you can tell. He looks at things a beat longer than most people do. He notices.

So when I laid out my bird books and my colors, he didn’t rush.

He looked.

Who He Is

Artists spend their lives paying attention to color.

Timothy knows how a blue changes when it sits next to green. How a sky shifts from morning to dusk. How a shade can feel cool or warm depending on the light around it.

But looking at color and wearing it are two different things.

When you make art, you’re usually standing outside of it.

For his Power Portrait, I wanted Timothy to step inside.

Why the Cerulean Warbler

Timothy loved the bird’s coloring from the moment he saw it.

The male Cerulean Warbler is sky-blue on top and clean white underneath, with a thin dark band across his throat, like a necklace. Some field guides describe that blue as the color of a clear summer sky.

Timothy kept coming back to that.

The colors that called to him were the ones that reminded him of the sky.

And the Cerulean Warbler lives there. It spends most of its life high in the canopy of tall, mature hardwood forests, often near rivers. It nests so high that most people who love it have only ever seen it from below, a speck of blue against more blue.

It’s also a bird that needs us to pay attention. The Cerulean Warbler has become one of North America’s fastest-declining songbirds as the old forests it depends on disappear. Every fall it makes the long trip to the mountain forests of South America, and every spring the survivors find their way back.

A small blue bird asking us to look up.

To notice.

Which is exactly what an artist asks of us too.

The Look

We built Timothy’s look out of sky.

Layered blues, from soft and airy to deeper and more saturated, wrapped and draped so the fabric could move with him. Light against his skin. Room to breathe. Room to reach.

My dye library even has a color called Cerulean Blue, named for the same sky as his bird.

When he put the blues on, something shifted.

His posture opened.

His chin lifted.

He started looking up.

The Session

We wandered the Wild Zen grounds together, chasing light.

Timothy moved through the trees and open grass like he was searching for the top of the canopy. He reached. He stretched. He tipped his face toward the sky as if he were checking that his colors still matched.

They did.

There’s a moment in every Power Portrait when a person stops posing and starts being. With Timothy, it came when he forgot about the camera and started noticing the light through the leaves.

The artist was back.

Only this time, he was part of the painting.

Color Connection

Sky blue is the color of openness. Of breath. Of space with no ceiling.

It’s linked to the throat and to clear expression: saying what’s true without needing to shout it. It’s cooling and calming, and it carries a kind of quiet optimism. The feeling of looking up on a clear day and remembering how big the world is.

The Cerulean Warbler’s white belly and dark necklace add contrast: structure and edges inside all that openness.

For an artist, I think sky blue offers something else too.

It’s the color of possibility. The blank canvas before the first stroke.

Look Up

So much of life pulls our eyes down. Toward screens. Toward the next step. Toward the to-do list.

Timothy reminded me how good it feels to look up.

To search the treetops for a tiny blue bird.

To find the sky, and then find it in yourself.

Find Your Bird

What color do you reach for when you look up?

What would it feel like to wear it?

Let’s find out together.