Lars sketching Spoon-billed Sandpiper in Chukotka 2010
Lars Jonsson was born in Stockholm in 1952. He is an artist, author and ornithologist. He has always had a passion for birds since a very early age, and his paintings are born out of a passion for birds and their environment. He had a one-man exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm in 1969 at the age of fiftheen and was early acknowledged internationally for his five bird guides published in the ninetheenseventies. In 1992 he published a complete field guide of “Birds of Europe with North Africa and the Middle East” widely regarded as a standard bird guide of the region. He has shown his art in galleries and museums in Sweden and internationally. He has published 12 books. He recieved a honorary doctorate at Uppsala University in 2002. He is widely acclaimed for his interpretation and poetic renderings of birds and nature. He resides on the island of Gotland in the baltic Sea, where he has his own Museum in an old vicarage.
Lars Jonsson primarily work outdoors painting “plein air” with a spotting scope as a tool. He paints both in water colour and oil and also prints lithographs. In the studio he works from the many thousands of sketches and watercolours of birds, landscapes, lights and details that he collects in the field in his sketchbooks.
Latest book (Winterbirds), published in Sweden 2015 and Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Holland in 2016 and England in 2017, also available in Spanish 2020