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"Signs of Passing"
24 x 19"
Acrylic on Cradled Birch, 2011
Still Life with Anna's Hummingbird
$4,200
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I began a series of trompe le’oeil still lifes over ten years ago, the hallmark of which are small, ordinary objects, including dead animal specimens, painted as though they are resting on the surface of a painting. My first efforts in this area were quite complex, culminating in the massive still life “Mine Is…” which features a complex interplay of written text, abstract space, natural and man-made objects, and illusionistic landscape painting. My recent efforts have been more reductive and severe, most notably, “Primary,” which features a dead sapsucker sprawled across a vibrant color field. “Sings of Passing” is of a very similar vein. It began when my grandmother found this beautiful dead female Anna’s hummingbird and saved it for me in her freezer. I was amazed that the bird’s little tongue was out, frozen in time as if she died in mid sip. The painting is intended to be an homage or tribute to its subject. Despite its beguiling simplicity, the piece was quite challenging because I had no real idea of how I wanted the background to look, only how I wanted it to feel. The result was painting and repainting, sanding and glazing until finally it simply felt right. The one thing I knew about the background was that I wanted to include an oversized silhouette of the fallen bird, inverted as if in death (calling distantly to mind the “After the Hunt” paintings of Harnett) and that there would be a warm luminous stripe running down the length of the painting, drawing in the viewer but also suggesting the hummingbird’s transcendence of the mortal coil. I wanted its death to evoke poignancy and beauty, but not sadness, while the symmetry of the composition and the allusions to the cross bring the viewer into a state of reverence and contemplation.
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