I only recently observed my first Yellow Warblers while on a hike at Sweetwater Wetlands here in Tucson. I am as excited as the next birder upon observing something I have not seen before, but the bright, acid yellow of these warblers was especially inspiring. I knew a painting was in order, so I spent several hours on a few occasions doggedly pursuing them with my camera until I finally had suitable reference material for a painting.

As an artist, especially one who is devoted to following his inspiration wherever it may lead, one notices over time how one painting idea influences the next. I have long been fascinated by pattern and repetition, an interest that led me to pursue the “Modern Camouflage Series” and later my “Pattern” series. This little painting is a somewhat more subtle outgrowth of both exercises.

The background pattern, while certainly a non-organic, non-objective environment in which the animal subject- in this case the Yellow Warbler- exists is in no way intended to disguise it, as in the camouflage series. Unlike the pattern series, the bird itself does not “become” a pattern. Instead, the other two birds become silhouettes, simple volumes of shape that echo, but do not repeat, the more detailed central subject. The background pattern is only dimly suggestive of the webwork of branches in which I observed the constantly moving warblers, but the piece is more about rhythms of movement created by these patterns, fluctuating angles of tail and beak, and the oscillation between values. The result is a seamless melding of representationalism and abstraction, description and suggestion, objectivity and interpretation that I hope conveys the nervous motion of these gem-like birds that inspired the painting in the first place.