“Battleground” started with a suggestion from a dear friend and great collector, who wondered if I could explore a piece based on the idea of red state bird representing a “blue” or liberal state and a blue state bird representing a “red” or conservative state. In addition to loving the initial concept, especially given my interest in birds, color, and the cultural associations thereof, I felt it was a very timely idea to explore in the early days of the highly contentious second Trump administration. While most of my work is not intended to address anything as topical as politics, I can’t escape the feeling that this piece, complete with its highly suggestive title, is one that rose quite decisively out of a very politically charged zeitgeist.

I pitched my collector a triptych, in which each state bird would be clinging to an outline of its representative state like a stylized perch, and portrayed in front of an American flag in either a blue, red, or violet monotone. The far left and right panels would showcase the red state, Idaho, represented by the Mountain Bluebird, and the blue state, Illinois, represented by the Northern Cardinal. The central panel would meld the red and blue to create violet, and portray the purple finch, the state bird of New Hampshire, a state which, though tending to lean Democratic in recent presidential elections, is still considered a “swing” or “battleground” state.

This is not the first time I have incorporated the American Flag in my work, nor the first time I have used the flag to suggest a less than entirely patriotic message, but “Battleground” remains one of the most overtly political paintings I have ever done. Though in this triptych they face off like warring factions, the birds themselves have no politics, and they sing their songs of lust, hunger, alarm, or contentment, quite heedless of the struggles we make for ourselves. The stridently different colors of the red and blue flags meld quite happily into a tertiary purple in the central panel, suggesting the harmony that, for the moment, illudes our society and its broken political system. Though human beings are not the only animals to make war and argument among themselves, this trait is not a common one, and it is ironically reserved for the most “evolved” of the primates. I can only hope that someday humankind learns to take a lesson from the rest of the natural world. For all of its brutality, nature does not create struggles where none exist. And all of the different colors, when combined together, become white light.