As I said in my previous entry "These little injuries" it was Darwin that introduced the concept into Victorian Britain that the animals we share our world with live lives of struggle. In most contemporary books on British wild life photographs are used to depict the various species this island has to offer, but I find these a little uninspiring and they hardly engage me in the same way as the illustrated books and manuals of the past.
For my depictions I wanted to create bold contemporary illustrations that have more in common with street art then twitchers manuals. Birds are oddly aspirational animals. "To be free as a bird" is a sadly wistful saying that seems to suggest that birds live carefree lives of plenty when the reality is that they are actually incredibly tough, they endure, survive and adapt.
My prints do not entirely do away with this perceived romanticism and I don't think I would want to entirely, but I do feel that they have been successful in that they feel very contemporary.
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I think that my original print "these little injuries" is the most successful of these three. The sense of weight and the line breaks feel right whereas "I might pray to be reborn" feels a little heavy. "Whippoorwill" is a commission piece for a London based production company. I was really pleased to get this commission and I'm happy with the outcome. The piece feels a little heavy, but then the bird looks fairly solid in real life as well so perhaps that's for the best.
