Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun


Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun and, I might add, they appear unbidden when I am trying to get to sleep. Birds posing, flying, eating, pecking, chasing, somersaulting for no apparent reason. So I assume they just want to have fun and they come to me because I am willing to give them a form on paper on a Friday night, to reside forever in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal.

I sometimes worry that I might run out of images. OMIGOD, what if I go to the well one day and it is dry. It is a profoundly irrational fear – what can I tell you. I have more ideas for paintings than I can possibly produce in this lifetime. The ideas sometimes come from a place I visited – or a particular experience. But more often than I would expect, they emerge from the ethers, rather fully developed and all I need to do is put what I see behind my eyeballs on paper. So it is with playful black birds. A sketch now – and almost certainly the ingredients for a more developed piece later.

Perhaps they are giving me a tip: winter is nearly over. Buy some pink and yellow tulips and put them on the dining room table for your husband to see. Prune the roses, clean the winter drudge from the windows, let the February sun stream through the open door onto the hardwood floor.

2 thoughts on “Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun”

  1. Cheryl,
    So Escher-like! And, of course, we’ve seen these prophetic birds before. Spring is doing its thing and the birds here in Oregon are doing what they are doing in Seattle–hookie–pookie-ing, screaming, yelling, flocking, splashing.Let us remember to do the same!
    Sandy

  2. Well, the birds are about negative and positive space. And yes, the crows and fighting over nest space. We saw a lonely grebe perching in a river, looking, looking for his love.

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