Emil Morhardt photographs birds where they live and paints them where he lives, in Santa Barbara, California. His studio sits high against the mountains, where many of the birds in his paintings—and the deer and bobcats—are his neighbors.
He welcomes commissions, including large multi-panel paintings and works in custom sizes with backgrounds tailored to a collector’s space. Several paintings on this website were commissioned. Contact Emil to discuss a painting.
Emil holds a BA from Pomona College and a PhD from Rice University. He began his academic career teaching vertebrate physiology at Washington University in St. Louis and concluded it at Claremont McKenna College, where he directed the Roberts Environmental Center and is now Professor Emeritus of Environmental Biology.
Between those academic appointments, he served as Chief Scientist at an environmental consulting firm in Santa Barbara and later as Senior Vice President at a larger firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. During that time, he also taught Industry and Ecology at Stanford University. Both firms he worked for employed scientists studying the effects of industrial operations on wildlife and ecological systems. That work took Emil into the field for many hours of observing animals and analyzing those effects—experiences he may explore in a future painting series.
As for art, he has been photographing and painting nature for most of his life, a logical adjunct to being an environmental biologist with lots of time in the field and a need to document it for both academic and consulting research. In the late nineties following an exceptionally wet year in the Mojave Desert, he and his wife, Sia, a botanist and ecologist, set out to document as many native desert flowers as they could. This seven-year project of frequent remote desert camping, with Emil photographing the flowers and Sia identifying and writing about them resulted in “California Desert Flowers” published by the University of California press in 2004.
On moving to Santa Barbara in 2011, Emil started photographing birds at the beach—an uncommonly good place since they are used to people being close by and sometimes come right over and look into the camera. He thought that it would be interesting to try to paint them. It has been.