Winter Solstice Release December 21st
Birds in Flight
I had an idea a few weeks ago and just couldn’t get it out of my mind - very late in the season, I have a new little offering. If you are local, I can get them to you by Christmas as I’ll have a pick up option at my home. Otherwise, they will most likely arrive after Christmas if it needs to be shipped.
Everything will be on the website Sunday, December 21st at 12pm EST
Oil on Canvas 6x6 paintings ~ $325
I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with birds. The above paintings are based on my living room window. I’m on the top floor of an apartment building and I get a perfect view of the geese flying by in the fall.
One of my other favorites is the long tailed sparrows (barn swallows), moving in murmurations. I lived near a small village in France called Chatuzange-le-goubet for two years when I was in my early teens. The house was nestled between two very large corn fields and that was perhaps the first time I really noticed the large groups of swallows that would swoop and dive.
It felt like the group was moving with one mind and with such obvious joy. I’ve always wanted to live like that, with joyful abandon. We take so much for granted. What if even the simple daily tasks and movement of our body gave us joy? Thinking about this lately.
I don’t have pictures of the finished birds yet as they are currently in their last firing in the kiln! It is always a bit of surprise to see how they turn out as glazes don’t always behave how we expect them to. They are going to be glazes I’ve used before on the wall vases - dark indigo, a bright cobalt blue that often gets bronze striations, eggshell white and a mauve color. The ceramic birds will be $150-$175 depending on size.
The following is a favorite poem from Mary Oliver called Starlings in Winter. It feels like a perfect description.
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly
they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.