April 27, 2022 Weekly Musings

Featured image: Flaming Flamingo

Be your best, be it a neutral-colored pigeon or a flaming flamingo. It makes no difference what color you are or how flamboyant you are. It doesn’t matter what exotic doodads you add to yourself. You are who you are because of your spirit. It makes no difference whether you are very social like Flamingos or if you like isolation like a pigeon. Flamingos and pigeons are all part of the “The Middle is not Gray” series.

Featured image: Two Cranes

Two Cranes
Two Black Birds
Saturday Mornings Glory
Rainbows in the studio creating waves across the wall.
An owl hooting.
Finches flocking.
Blackbirds, two, against white remnants of snow.
Two cranes flew overhead.
Wings tawny dusted with black. Necks elegant, stretched out legs.
Powell Marsh is but a short distance away.
Glorious Saturday morning – the sun is shining.
Sky is blue. Glorious Saturday morning.

Featured image: Journey of the Black Bird

I have 3, maybe more, black birds that visit my ground feeder. They are such beautiful birds, especially when the sunlight catches the shine on their bodies. The blacks become wonderful purples and blues, deep, deep purples and blues. When they fluff their feathers, their colors are even more glorious.
I generally have black birds at my feeders all year long. In the summer after I have watered the grass, they love looking for worms. And at the same time, their “caw caw” resounds in the early hours, serving as a wake up song for the start of a new day.

I love watching them negotiate their ways through the trees with their marvelous wing spans. They move cautiously from one branch to the next, grabbing a morsel to eat and quickly flying away, for I have a fox that loves my feeders also. They land on the nearest low branch and enjoy their lunch. They rarely come to the feeders early in the morning. It is usually mid-day when I see them in the woods looking for food.

According to legend folklore and mythology, the black bird signifies mystery and magic. The black bird frequently appears in the costumes of tribal cultures and is extremely captivating. Hence the title of this work. Their historical journey has been with us for 100’s of years. Their mysterious journeys have lived in our imaginings for just as long.

Featured image: Scarlet Tanager

Taxonomies, classification, order. It may not seem that these words belong to art, but really, they do. Artists and art historians have for years been changing the orders, the recipes, rules, classifications and taxonomies of art and art histories. The changes from the art movement Impressionism to abstract is but one example.

Like scientists, artists have been creating hybrids and crossbreeding works. I, for example, mix all different kinds of water-based media in my work. I don’t t just stick to one kind of water based media in any of my works, which is why I call my work water based media rather than watercolors.

But if you order art or anything for that matter, you give the impression that there is an end to things. A bird is always classified as a bird. That never changes. But as I look at my bird feeders and my artwork, I see the variations of finches. I know they have no idea how they are classified, labeled or ordered and that some of them are mix and matched, just like I do with my water-based medias.

There is that ever slight variation of red heads, red breasts and beaks. But science is persistent and labels these variations. The question is whether that box is always closed and representing an ending or does that box remain open and constantly change?

Because they change and become the “other” to what is identified, change represents paradoxes, the “other” side to popular labeling.
I have said this before, but I like repeating it, things never end they just change.Change happens because there is always “the other” to everything.