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"Late Spring Lyric II"
24 x 12"
Acrylic on Board, 2009
American Goldfinch
$3,800
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“Late Spring Lyric II” is the follow up to its companion piece, “Late Spring Lyric.” Again my initial inspiration was the sharp contrast of the vibrant spring plumage of the bird, in this case an American Goldfinch, with the dried out remnants of last year’s vegetation. I encountered this Goldfinch while hiking in Point Reyes, one of my very favorite coastal areas in CA. I was actually researching for another painting entirely when this fellow’s sweet song caught my ear. My primary interest in this piece was in playing with the luminous yellow of the bird’s plumage, contrasting it with cool violets and blue violets, muted, mingled with brown, and eventually transitioning into more yellows in the lower quadrant of the page. While the hard silver, brown and black tracery of the dried stems are faithfully portrayed, I’ve taken more liberties in de-objectifying the background of this piece than in its predecessor, and I’ve clearly chosen to be a bit more minimal in my approach. As is my wont, the looseness of the background does transition into the subject itself. While the bird is treated hyper-realistically, the plant on which he is perching actually becomes quite suggestive upon closer inspection; in fact, only a few clusters of dried flower heads are really painted with full botanical sharpness.
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