birds

oil on wood panel. diptych. @3x4'

in my recent return to paint, i decided to work on this older painting i had started years ago. the story goes that i put the first layer down and decided, no... i want to do this big. So i did a triptych that was 6x12'. It took me a hell of a long time and i ended up with hundreds of birds.

remembering scientific specimen trays of dead birds i had seen in a museum in South Africa, i was thinking about mortality in the face of all of the corruption and greed that was pouring into the news. Heirarchies and classification, signifigance and insignifigance, and more obviously nature and culture. lots of "male" issues in there for me, though i know every artist and their mother has worked with dead birds at one point or another.

the form stays with me, as seen in other posts here... boats and the like. (i'm sure it's just my vaginal fallus over and over... but ah well, we make what we make sometimes.)