keeping record

A grey heron, a ring on its leg identifying it with 7R7, tucks its neck and lifts its enormous body into the air, its wings spanning six feet. How well it’s adapted for flight, for migration. Upon landing its feathers settle back into their uniform pattern, its body quiets and there it stands, perfectly still, solitary.

I never tire of this scene, maybe that’s why I’ve painted it so many times.

Throughout history humans have drawn, etched and carved images of birds in stone. We’ve lived in parallel worlds, observing each other since the beginning. Even today their habits and migration patterns show us when a season has arrived or if it has arrived too soon.

This first series of paintings are life size, drawn from photographs taken in and around Barcelona, where I live. Seeing the finished paintings of these herons, cormorants and egrets, I am often struck by the birds’ actual size. The heron, even with its head tucked, reaches the height of my dining room table, the egret comes up to my knee.

I normally leave the background white, to emphasize the motion, implicit in the scene- the claws curling delicately around a branch or the upward movement of a leg tucking quietly into the feathers. The style of painting is reminiscent of early nineteenth-century ornithological and botanical illustration, done by naturalists before the invention of photography to capture the essential aspect of the bird or plant.

Both the technique and the subject allow me to enter into the intricate ecological connection these birds share, and by extension to understand something about our own relationship with nature and our dependence upon it.