A few weeks ago, I was finishing up a critique with my professor, mentor, and friend – Jane. As she looked over my paintings, we began to discuss the quality they share with my short films, and the sensibilities I employ in both. She asked me if there was anything I had been thinking about that isn’t in the paint yet – maybe something I had been sketching, a theme I had been pondering. There was. Ever since January I haven’t been able to stop thinking about…birds. Tiny Birds, to be specific. I know, It’s strange – but that’s how it works. An idea creeps into my brain before I even know why its so profound to me, and a few months later, after some writing, sketching, and inspiration – maybe I can start making art with it. It begins with an idea I don’t even understand, or want – I mean really, what artist in their right mind wants to tackle bird art? It was an idea I found laughably stupid, and then Yo La Tengo came along and made it sound a bit more real for me. I started writing and sketching, and began finding evidence in my own sensibilities to the theme, but I needed something more, a breakthrough – to make me really want it.
So she asked the question, and I had to answer. “Birds,” I accidently whispered, “There’s something about birds.” I started talking about why the winged creatures make sense to me in a way that might just be unique. I talked about lonesome creatures that travel to survive, creatures that are so infinitely numbered that individual personality is impossible – anonymity and struggle is what makes any single bird humanly personable. These ideas may not be unique to me alone, but I was beginning to explain something that I thought just might be – something spiritual, something to do with faith – that I was having trouble describing with words. And then she interrupted, “Stop. You must buy Winged Migration.” So last weekend, during one of many hours at the east Wichita Borders, I did just that.
The writer and narrator, Jacques Perrin, gave me the words I had not yet been able to craft in the film’s opening line:
The story of migrating birds is the story of a promise, a promise to return.
Now it made sense, and instantaneously – I was in love. The film is gorgeous, and like nothing you have ever seen. Even if you’re the type of person who can’t watch nature shows for more than five minutes at a time, you will find yourself incapable of keeping a wow from escaping your lips. And when the journey is complete, you’ll want to take it again. I did anyhow, I watched it three times in my parents’ theater, and not once did my focus waiver. It’s the best collaborative art I have ever seen, and a fair reason to hope for earthly reincarnation (don’t though, its not gonna happen). As for my art, I still don’t know how birds are going to come into the picture, or if they will show up in a representational way at all. But now the idea is complete, the mercury has risen and rested at the top, and whatever I paint tomorrow will be bird art to me, and I suppose that’s all that matters.