Bower Birds of a Feather

                     Bower Birds of a Feather....acrylic, 8" x 8" x 1"    

This painting is a montage of images sketched from photographs, arranged & painted in layers of acrylic.  Originally, the background was glossy with splotches of teal and white, but it was visually competing with the cluster of birds.   I painted over the glossy color with a matte teal paint & added the dots to frame the imagery.  The shade and sheen remind me of a robin's egg.

I began reading a book the other day, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  It has been on my list for a few years, since I watched a movie based on one of his other books, Everything is Illuminated.  It's been a long while since I read anything that wasn't art history related, I have a bad habit of starting books and leaving them halfway through.  Then there are the few rare books that I've read ten times over, like A Farewell to Arms & Jurassic Park.  Anyhow, there is a small section where the little boy in the book imagines people with skin that changes color according to their mood, to better understand the feelings of others.

This struck a chord with me, and also reminded me a lot of the mood rings that were so popular in the early 90s.  As your skin temperature changed, so would the color of the ring (mine was always blue, which was supposed to mean relaxed, but I got bored with the fact that it was always the same.)  I can remember being anxious that the color would shift to red or orange and my true feelings would be revealed (warm colors weren't as 'good' as the cool ones).   The little blue bunting, my favorite in the scene, looks to be about the color of my old mood ring.  I'd like to do a whole series of these bird paintings, with stacks & stacks of birds of varying colors--maybe an invented species with arbitrary colors like neon pink, purple and deep blue. My mood ring bird series.