Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

Adele Earnshaw's 'Counterpane', 24 X 48, oil, a piece appearing at the 2012 Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina.

By Todd Wilkinson

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.  ~Māori Proverb

Adele Earnshaw has found her true painting stride at the same time economic turmoil in the world is wreaking havoc. It’s serendipitous perhaps.  Art, after all, is about transformation—of sunlight, material, substance, and occasionally, of artists themselves. “Hunger in the gut is not something you learn or can be taught. It is born of necessity. Either you have it or you don’t,” Earnshaw said recently from her home in Oak Creek Canyon outside of Sedona, a community in northern Arizona not far from the Grand Canyon. It’s an enchanting confluence of geography, encircled by Navajo sandstone cliffs that turn a glowing red with each dusk and dawn.

“Here in the canyon at 5,000 feet we have a pretty big creek with ponderosa pine, sycamore and oak, beneath which we often find tracks of bear and mountain lion,” she says. For those unfamiliar with this native-born New Zealander, Earnshaw is a transplanted Kiwi who has spent a lengthy stretch of her adult life in the US and is best known for her supple watercolors.

Born in 1949, her ties to the Asian South Pacific aren’t superficial. Earnshaw’s bloodline in New Zealand goes back six generations to when colonists from Britain came ashore and encountered the...