I have already painted the stunning European Robin several times before, but it is a subject I know I will return too again and again. Color, form, and habit, are all compelling, and each experience I have with these wonderful birds suggests something entirely new. I observed this handsome fellow early one chilly morning at Sculpture by the Lakes. He was puffed up to such an absurdly spherical shape that the old phrase “Round Robin” immediately entered my head. Referencing the great illustrator Charlie Harper, who was known for reducing birds to the simplest and most elegant of geometries, I decided to pair the robin with a series of circles, only suggesting, but not describing, its coloration and form. The polka-dots further this juxtaposition of objective and non-objective, organic, and geometric.

One of the biggest technical challenges of this piece was my determination to have the bird standing on the bottom of the picture plane, as though the lower edge of the painting is, in fact, its perch. The deliberate reductivism of form also required a very cleanly edited composition. As such, what to leave out became far more important than what to leave in. There were several crucial junctures where I was concerned that this piece was not working, but everything clicked together in the end to create something playful and modern just as I had intended.