The Blue Tit is an exceptionally common garden bird in the UK, but for a foreigner like myself, I simply can’t get complacent about seeing them. Their delightful combination of acid yellow, indigo blue, white, and green, is hard for an artist like myself to resist. So I haven’t! “String Theory” is not my first Blue Tit painting, and it almost certainly won’t be my last. I was fortunate to have a good friend in the UK who set up a series of bird feeders for me during my last stay in England, and I spent many hours crouched nearby with my camera, carefully stalking these and other glorious British Songbirds for painting reference.

Much of this piece is about the color story of the bird, but like a lot of my recent work it is also an exploration of the tension between a sense of illusionistic depth and flat, decorative treatments. In “String Theory,” color fields and simple lines that would otherwise appear entirely flat are thrust into three-dimensions by the placement of the birds hanging from or perching on the stripes. With just a few subtle points of contact and carefully placed shifts in color, value, and color temperature, flat shapes become alive and animate. I have already started a “String Theory II,” and I am confident that this idea will become a series in its own right.