ABOUT

Debby Kaspari graduated from California College of the Arts in Oakland and for over 25 years has been an artist, illustrator and designer. Nature and science have been the themes of her work, nationally exhibited in shows such as Birds in Art, Art and the Animal and Art of the Animal Kingdom. She has just completed field guide plates for Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (Cornell University/Comstock Press) and illustrations for Coyote at the Kitchen Door (Harvard University Press).

Kaspari first began drawing and painting the rainforest on a trip to Trinidad in the 1980s. She fell in love with the lush exotic landscape and made many subsequent trips to the tropics, including sites in Panama and Costa Rica. Last winter, a grant from the Don and Virginia Eckelberry Endowment allowed her to make a trip up the Amazon River to work at a research station deep in the rainforest of Peru, resulting in artworks for “Drawing the Motmot: An Artist’s View of Tropical Nature” at Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. “Kaspari’s drawings allow us to contemplate… striking a good balance between detailed accuracy and broader artistic concerns” (John Brandenburg, The Oklahoman).

Debby Kaspari is a member of Society of Animal Artists, Artists for Conservation, The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma, with her husband Mike Kaspari, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of Oklahoma. Her award-winning blog, Drawing The Motmot, can be found at http://drawingthemotmot.wordpress.com.