Ornithomancy
We are just now at the beginning of our journey. 2018 | Watercolor and Gouache on stretched paper | 40" x 30" x 1.5"
November 4, 2018
Buzzing with energy, a curious broad-tailed hummingbird approached, asking "What are you?," closely followed by a painted bunting gliding overhead, using his innate senses to find his way. A while later, a peacock strolled up and announced his arrival, a colorful concept map of interconnecting ideas and thoughts on display behind him. "Well, hello there," he said in a confident and playful tone, ready to finally reveal himself to the world (see my Art page for image). Three makes a pattern, and my Ornithomancy series was hatched into existence.
I didn't begin with a series in mind, but as these three early paintings took shape, I realized I had a sketchbook filled with bird-related ideas that kept pulling me back to them, demanding my attention. Some of them simmered for long periods while some just flew out. They came when they were ready, when I was ready, when the time was right, and not a moment sooner. Part science, part magic, part story-telling, they sprang from a place in my brain that actively uses both intellect and intuition, a marriage between two opposite ways of processing information and of operating in the world. As the parts of me that thirst to soak up as much of the physical world and how it works (such as in Universe) merge with the parts that for so much of my adult life I kept tucked away in a little box but have recently come to bloom through my Visual Meditations, working to establish harmony has become a dominant force in my life. These two seemingly disparate energies are continually weaving together more and more seamlessly.
Ornithomancy is the practice of using birds in divination, and while the word stems from ancient Greece, the practice can be found across cultures. Birds appear as oracles, messengers from beyond the veil, totems, and guides. Outside of modern science, the practice is almost universally familiar, spawning myths, poetry, and fables. As these two parts of my inner self began to feel less at odds with each other, my interest in the different ways humans have sought to understand the world around them has increased. The practice of Ornithomancy reveals both the human ability (or habit) of seeking patterns where patterns may not exist as well as our keen observational skills and how we put those to practical use. Four magpies gathered together may not be an accurate way to predict the birth of a child, as the nursery rhyme "One for Sorrow" suggests, but watching bird behavior in order to determine weather patterns was long an effective tool in human history.
The series exists to explore those connections on one level, and on another each painting documents themes in my life, what I am struggling with, what breakthrough in my personal growth has recently occurred, what I am working on changing or manifesting—almost like casting a spell through the act of painting. The personal narrative is inexplicitly laced throughout the paintings, while the titles of each intentionally refer to written and oral methods of story-telling. Some paintings pull a line from a poem, oral history, or other narrative device, adding another layer of contextual information about the subject. Other titles have been conjured specifically for that painting. But all maintain sentence form capitalization and punctuation, suggesting that it is merely a moment in a larger story. A beginning, a middle, and an end all at once.
The painting pictured here is titled, "We are just now at the beginning of our journey." The line comes from the epic twelth-century Persian poem written by Farid Ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, in which a group of birds journeys through symbolic valleys learning moral lessons along the way and is perhaps the quintessential example of bird-related allegory. While no literary canon centered on birds would be complete without it, this is a case where all of the elements came together almost magically. The painting adopts the theme of Death as a transformation. Based loosely on a photo I took along a road between Fort Davis and Alpine in far west Texas, I added in the buzzards (or turkey vultures), calling on their associations with death. As this painting came to life, I was reminded by a friend of a man I knew in my twenties who had been something of a guru to myself and many others. An academic from Iran, he immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, and then stayed when the Iranian Cultural Revolution occurred (a period when those representing Western or non-Islamic ideas were purged or silenced in various ways). Despite his credentials, his job options in the U.S. were more limited, and many art students worked for him painting interiors around town, myself, my ex-husband, and many friends included. We spent a lot of time together, and he was known for opening his mouth and effortlessly pouring out a kind of wisdom that felt monumental at that age. The painting commemorated a moment when I felt I was at a critical point of passage, and the timeliness of the memory of his wisdom combined with the near perfect symbolic fit was too good to pass up.
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