“Your Own Backyard” 5×7, oil on canvas

My mother-in-law takes photographs and writes poetry. This January she’s creating images from her own backyard and when she posted a picture of a little bluebird, I fell in love. He was cute and poised, practically begging for me to turn him into a painting. So I tried, thinking it’d be an easy one. It wasn’t. The painting was just okay. 

So I moved onto another little I had been working on. A painting that continues a figurative series I started a couple months ago. Notice the little bluebird on top who has found a nest among the wild and unkempt landscape of her head.

I don’t think this series has yet run its course. I’m not sure where else I want it to go or what else I want to do with it, but I know the fact that I have a series going keeps me from forever looking at a blank canvas wondering what, of all the infinite possibilities, I could choose as my subject. 

So often limitation feeds expansion. It’s like discovering the universe in your own backyard.