Though this is the nineteenth piece in my “String Theory” Series, it is also the third in a body of paintings exploring small local songbirds native to my new home in the Arizona Desert. I was excited to encounter these Bridled Titmice in Tubac, not far south of my home in Tucson, last year while searching for the rare Rose-Throated Becard. I never saw a Becard, but one can hardly call a birding expedition a failure when one is privileged to send time observing these sprightly and energetic little titmice. Their demure cream, grey, and black plumage inspired the neutral palette, which subtly contrasts warms and cools.

On a conceptual level, the contrast between illusionistic imagery and flat decorative treatments has been at the core of my work for nearly twenty years, owing largely to my study of modern art, so it should come as no surprise that an image of birds essentially flying into a Barnett Newman painting and perching on the stripes came into my head like a thunderbolt. Simply by virtue of their proximity to more descriptive elements like the birds, otherwise completely flat areas of color become alive and animate in three-dimensional space. Of course, the concept evolved well past this initial point of inspiration to become something entirely new and very much my own. These pieces, cheekily titled “String Theory,” suggest the dislocation of birds from their natural environments and their adaptiveness to the urban and suburban habitats we have made. These colorful stripes are not meant to “describe” anything as mundane as a fence posts, branches, or bird feeders; rather they become their own non-objective environments, beautiful, evocative, and otherworldly.