Fleeting

Throughout my life I have found myself captivated by the mysterious and often fleeting attention of "wild animals" - struck since childhood by the intensity of catching the gaze of a deer across a field or a bird sitting upon her nest.  These experiences often cause me to become silent and still and utterly present, unable to predict how long the connection will hold or to know what our meeting means to my nonverbal counterpart.  The beauty and delicacy of sharing time and space with a being so wild and unknowable (to us) in their thoughts and movements has long inspired me as both an artist and co-inhabitant of the planet. My artworks are often an attempt to capture the essence of interactions like these -  moments marked by both connection and detachment, movement and stillness, tangibility and ambiguity.

I began this series a few years ago, drawing birds because they seemed perfect metaphors for this particularly transitory element of time, experience, and nature itself.  Since then we’ve learned that the birds are actually disappearing in staggering numbers - billions of birds in the last 50 years.  Fleeting indeed.