Painting the stilled songbirds produces evidence that they once existed, existed in a world that never noticed their arrival and does not feel diminished by their individual demise. Their look will remain both their image and their closed eye gaze. Nature is not pleasant and dreamy. Nature as it really exists is cruel. In this context the fact that beauty can be encountered is breathtaking. Even within death and despite nature these birds are beautiful. Beauty does not have to be an exception but it could be a basis for some sort of internal order enclosed within. My paintings of birds are not imitating nature but proposing an alternative world. They are a figurative representation where symbolism and more general cultural images are interwoven together allegorically. Some of these visual cues are obvious and others remain quietly oblique as inconsequential presences in a conceptual background.
In two paintings, birds have been painted against a blackboard. A blackboard contains the most transient of images. A time based momento mori. Images are made with the implicit understanding that they will be rubbed away. One blackboard extols the truth that 2+4=8. The painting after all is just a pretend image. The number eight is the symbol of infinity in mathematics. Painting the birds is a reversal in the values of a western modernist society. It is an acknowledgement of the sacred, a re-capturing of an image in this multi-image age.
The painted images reaffirm their own reality by stressing the physicality of the painting and the abstraction of its method of representation, brushstroke after brushstroke, strengthening the connection with the departed birds. These stilled images of birds question the nature of reality, when what seems tangible and given can so easily become a mirage, or a curtain with nothing behind it.