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The "Birds Up Close" series is really a child of my "Bewildered Beast" series that also encompasses my recent show in New York entitled “A Bird Rested Upon His Thoughts as He Slept”. Looking back, the first emergence of the bird theme was a large charcoal and acrylic drawing on paper (pictured to the right) started during my first residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2005. These pieces evolved from single bird figures with strong human characteristics to groups of birds engaged in allegorical relationships. These works have nothing to do with ornithology. The titles, subtitles, and haiku like writing that occasionally accompany these images have become a more integral part of the work and are important to the story at hand.
As someone who grew up in the Louisiana marshlands, I appreciated birds as a part of and victims of human interaction. I hunted birds as a boy, but in time I grew more intrigued with observing them rather than shooting them. I was moved by the story of John J Audubon after reading his biography and seeing his Birds of America folio of engraved plates produced between 1827-1838 from watercolors created from his travels throughout the Eastern United States, primarily in Louisiana.
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