Debby Kaspari Bio

Debby Kaspari is an illustrator and artist of birds, animals and landscapes, mixing scientific illustration with more personal works in mixed media. Drawing from life and capturing imagery in the field is the foundation of her work.

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. She is a member of Society of Animal Artists, Artists for Conservation, The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.

In 2011, Kaspari was the recipient of the Harvard Forest Bullard Fellowship, where she pursued studies of the ecology and history of the New England landscape. Her paintings have been exhibited in Birds in Art (Woodson Museum), Art of the Animal Kingdom (Bennington Center for the Arts) and the Society of Animal Artists’ Art and the Animal. Kaspari’s illustration work includes the forthcoming Field Guide to Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (Cornell University Press), paleo-­‐reconstructions for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and numerous covers and illustrations for Bird Watcher’s Digest. As an Eckelberry Fellow, Kaspari drew birds and plants in the Peruvian Amazon for her 2010 installation, “Drawing the Motmot” at SNOMNH.

Debby Kaspari lives in Norman, Oklahoma with her husband, OU professor and 2008 Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow, Mike Kaspari.

For more information, check out Debby's award-winning blog, Drawing The Motmot.