Birds

I decided to try something other than people and go for the birds. I was thinking about how free birds are and how bound most people are. We get caught up in money, possessions, relationships, truth and fiction, and playing games. We get stressed and it affects our health and everything else in our lives. Birds don't have much, but at the same time, they have everything. They always have a song in their hearts. They sing in the rain and in the sunshine. They create their nests and sit on their eggs, show their babies to fly and then let them go, which is more than a lot of us do. Birds can teach us a lot; we just have to stop what we're doing for a few minutes and watch the birds. I painted a background of blue, green and white, then wrote a story about birds and people over the entire foundation. Most of it I covered up with gesso. Our stories get covered up all the time.
I painted the birds and houses on muslin, and tried to make them 3D by stuffing them a bit with batting. I don't know if I like what I did with it, but I tried to show bird's lives and peoples lives together. Birds don't get parking tickets for sitting in trees, and they don't need prescriptions from doctors, or have to write cheques to buy their nests.

I haven't fastened the birds to the substrate yet - I may sew them onto fabric instead. Let me know what you think.

Here is a close up of one of the birds