BIRD SILHOUETTES
I began working with bird images around 2003. I'm an avid "bird watcher" and very interested in nature and the environment, having grown up in a heavily wooded area that was reduced to shopping malls and subdivisions as I grew up. My parents always had binoculars and bird identification books on hand and we watched the migrating birds each year. So, when birds started appearing in my art I just thought it was natural since I'd always been drawn to them.
At first, portraying birds was an expression of my spiritual connection with nature. After reading an article about the declining bird populations here in Georgia I focused on environmental issues instead.
I was asked to be in this exhibition called "Art and Ecology" and because my panels are small the curator wanted to put my work on their curved wall, which doesn't work well with large paintings.
They asked me how many panels I had on hand and I asked them for the size of the wall, then determined that 100 panels would cover the wall from end to end. At the time I didn't have 100 so I was very busy to get the works completed on time, but did.
A description of this work is under my "Artist Statement and General Information" section on this site.
In 2016 I proposed painting silhouettes of birds in decline on a stone wall at Blue Heron Nature Preserve here in Atlanta, Georgia. It actually started as a casual suggestion by the director of the activity center at the preserve and I thought it was a good idea and I went to figure out how to paint the birds on a rough stone wall outside. I made stencils using Audubon's birds and traced the images then painted them using flat enamel paint. I tried my best to use the natural shapes of the stones, incorporating them into the overall design.
As I was working on the mural it dawned on me that I was creating something similar to ancient Cave Paintings and it struck me that many of the animals depicted in the cave paintings are now extinct just as many of these bird species will be in the not so distant future.