Life imitates art more than art imitates life….

These are words Oscar Wilde wrote in The Decay of Living.

Many years ago, when I first painted a canary perched on the edge of a silver cup, it was purely as a necessary compositional element. I needed something yellow, with height. To say that piece flew off the wall  (ahem)  is an understatement. We humans are fascinated by birds. Whether because they represent freedom, or due to our attraction to their color, song, their elusiveness… They fascinate and engage us. 

The artist in me goes through periods of refusing to paint birds because it feels like pandering: purely pretty things that pull at heartstrings can feel empty, devoid of the stirrings that move an artist to create. Afterall, how silly is the idea of a wild bird sitting in an interior, on a vase? I struggle with the relative absurdity–the banality of this more than I care to admit. No one wants to create shallow art.

And yet I love birds. You probably love birds. We put out feeders to lure them into world, we use apps to identify them by their song. There are clubs that travel the world in search of a rare sighting, and motion-activated cameras that allow us to watch them up close. And so, again and again, I find myself pulled into the orbit of the bird as not-still-life object. My painting of birds has attuned me even more to them-and particularly as it pertains to composition: perching habits, the odd angles at which they swivel their heads or bend their bodies, the way wings wrap around their backs.

Mr. Wilde asserted that life imitates art more than the other way around because we are so influenced by the things we see in art, that we then look for and are more attuned to such things in life. Especially in our image-saturated world, the things we respond to aesthetically in images prime us to notice them when they occur in real life. 

On a recent trip to Morocco, I watched with amused amazement a certain morning ritual. Several house buntings had taken up residence in our open-air riad. Each morning we breakfasted in the courtyard and watched the little birds flit down to our level, dipping in the water of the fountain, and then routinely perching on the ceramic vases adorning the room’s mantelpiece. The first time I watched it happen, I was giddy. I was vindicated! The bird-as-still-life was real! Somehow this reality made my paintings of birds perched on things less contrived fairytale, more actual. Life imitating art. Would I have noticed and delighted in this little event taking place in a corner of our space had I not first conceived to paint it?  Mr. Wilde says no. Either way, noticing things is good for our souls and art makes us notice things within itself, and without. Just one more reason to love it.

Cheers!