This piece was one of a series of bird pieces I did last year. I can't seem to help being drawn to a fallen bird; there's something so terribly beautiful in a broken bird's wings. (And I say that as someone who would never intentionally harm a bird or wish them harm: my subjects all came to their end on their own.) I wrote a statement at the time. I share it here:
"There is a tragic beauty in a fallen bird: warm bodies that once traced the skies, wings that played on the wind. In death they are so helpless, so peaceful, and so beautiful, still. There is so much life left in the wing that once flew.
I see my paintings as remembrances of the birds that were, an attempt to capture that fleeting beauty left behind: not memorials to loss, but homages to the life that was. They are a momento mori, a reflection of mortality, not as an ominous foreboding, but as reminder that we still live now, in this moment."
Wings 12x16" oil on panel, 2017