Statement

Notes About this Work

I first started painting dead birds a long time ago when my cat brought her kill into my apartment. My first thought was that it would be a good opportunity to practice rendering, which is a kind of visual truth-seeking. Almost immediately, I felt a profound tenderness for the bird, and even more than that—a kind of kinship. Those feelings seemed connected to losses and near losses from my past, particularly of young people and children (soaring, flitting creatures, suddenly stilled). I followed that thread, and the drawings and paintings that emerged helped me see that painful things are also beautiful, that truth has beauty inherent within it, even in a purely visual sense. This isn't a new idea, of course, but it fascinates me, how beauty persists in the most awkward, tragic , sad and unseemly aspects of the world, and of us. I continue to test and explore this idea.

Included here is the last of the dead robin paintings I made back then.Suspended 3. As it turns out, I find not-formerly-animate, dead-like things equally compelling—tree parts, pinecones, an abandoned wasp's nest, shed antlers found in the woods—and I included three paintings of those things as well. The final three paintings are of my current muse, a broken pheasant taxidermy. I'm still unpacking my fascination with this rather clumsy oddity, but it points to all kinds of interesting human foibles, like trying to be something we’re not, maybe to please others, and how that never works, and how our bodies (like our pretenses) fail, degrade and break down like things do. I played with scale for this show, called in that direction by the towering, elegant walls of the venue, which pushed the question of exposure still further.

My earlier dead robin studies and the paintings they led to are collected under the heading, "little bird, little bird".
‍
*Show title borrowed with permission from artist and designer Anja Schutz