Soul Retrieval

In my 50’s I died twice during a surgery.  I had been depressed for months afterward, sometimes wondering why they brought me back to this carbon-based body from such a beautiful place of light.  Around the same time, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston started to exhibit their enormous copy of Audubon’s Birds of America in the American Art galleries.   It finally hit me that all these gorgeous images were painted from dead specimens, pinned to walls in different poses to look alive…. surrounded by plants and landscape to dispel the lie.    

One day, standing before that book, I felt like the Audubon bird on that opened page.   I left the museum and went to my studio and started surrounding things with white…paint, gesso, white out, cutting, erasing…

These works are painted on pages from a 1942 Vintage edition of "The Birds of America", " With Forward and Descriptive Captions by William Vogt”, by John James Audubon, The Macmillan Company, 1942 (third printing of this modern edition).  The book contains 435 numbered plates.   

This series is gesso and acrylic on full-page prints (color art plates from lithographs) of birds, an ongoing series since 2017.  Each book page is approx. 12 x 9 inches.

Read the whole story HERE.