Rats & Seagulls

Red-billed Seagull

Rats In-progress

To go along with the irony of the sparrow situation, I add the Red-billed Seagull. I see these guys just as much as the good ole sparrow. I enjoy watching them. They can be found atop a high perch checking out the scenery or fighting each other over scraps. The piece of wood came from the wood workshop.

Okay...Rats. Thank god I don't see them as much as the above mentioned critters. I've only seen one and it was outside scampering into some bushes and not in my skid row apartment. Over the course of my 5 weeks of school, I've gone in a completely different direction from my usual work but now it's time to pull in the reins a bit before I get completely lost making weirdo stuff.

Back to the basics. Do I stay with birds? "Why birds?", "What would you be painting if you didn't paint birds?", "Since your visits to Te Papa is your interest in dead or live birds?"...in a nut shell I don't know how to articulate the direction I'm headed in. I got a heap load of books which I thumbed through but I felt it necessary "to paint it out".

So, I thought one way to figure out how I feel about birds in my work is to make a painting without them. I do know that I love to draw the organic shapes and work with the natural colors of critters so I'll just paint some non-avian animals.

The ironic thing is that I chose to paint a ship rat, a norway rat, and a house rat because they are all non-native New Zealand mammals directly linked to the extinction of many indigenous birds. Take out the image of the bird but the bird still remains...