Bird Paintings

The Extinct Bird Paintings are about the loss of real-time information and the reliance on secondhand information to experience something that was once alive. This is archaeology. We can never truly experience a species or civilization once it is extinct. This does not stop us from trying to imagine what it was like. We reconstruct the past from what is left, from descriptions by observers or speculations by historians. We know it by relics. In the case of birds, it is skeletons and preserved skins and drawings from a species that is no more.

As an artist, this leaves me a lot of room for interpretation. I paint the birds as realistically as I can with the information available. Beyond that, I am trying to give them an existence in memory by painting them larger than life with, what I hope is, a presence and dignity that will make us wonder why they are gone and appreciate what is lost.