There are paintings that come from an experience...others begin with a spark of imagination...still others grow from a catchy title...and then there are the images that reach down your throat, grab you by the heart and demand to be painted.
In the fall of 2003 i was returning from the East coast where I'd attended the Waterfowl Festival. I loitered in Nashville a while, visiting family and was crossing Kansas on the way to see my Dad in a Denver hospital before returning home. Over the years since moving west the first time at age 17, I have crisscrossed Kansas many times...and one of my favorite sights is the hawks that hunt from fenceposts along the roadside. As usual, I was hawk watching...looking for the first Swainson's that would signal "West" for me.
Out of nowhere an image came to me...a painting of a hawk caught in the barbed wire that had taken its life. I was a little shocked by this for two reasons...first, though I'd admired other artists' works with deceased subjects, I'd never felt remotely inspired to paint a dead bird...and second, though I must have read about it somewhere, in all my years of hawk watching I had never seen such a thing.
Nonetheless, the thought of this painting was so compelling that I made a mental note to keep an eye out for a dead hawk on the wire. Within an hour...there it was. I was stunned, but not too stunned to wrestle the truck and trailer to the emergency lane in order to walk over and shoot some reference.
As I walked toward the bird, shooting photos, I noticed that something wasn't "right"...then it hit me...the bird had "no head". It wasn't a hawk...it was a shorteared owl.
This unfortunate soul had been caught by the wrist of one wing on the top wire. It had fought, as evidenced by the tendons wrapped around the barb, and the dried blood down the wing. The other wing swung free in the breeze and the bird's head was bowed over its talons, which gripped the second wire down.
There was a terrible beauty in this image...more striking because in its last moment, frozen by death...the bird seemed to hold a pose of prayer. Feet together clutching the wire and head bowed over them.
Imagine this bird, hunting from the nearby post, sees its prey and dives...only to catch a barb. Then the struggle, the vain fight to free itself. Its feet grasp the second wire, to rest...it fights again...then rests...finally, the last time, its head falls over its feet. Such a tragic end, the pain, exhaustion, fear...did merciful shock kill it more quickly...or did it slowly starve there, hanging from that wire?
After a few photographs, I cut the owl out of the barbed wire and lay it gently in the prairie grass. As I continued my drive, I thought about this bird, the image and the many things analogous to it. At the time, my Dad was fighting for his life...a struggle that, like the owl, he would eventually lose. I thought of people (and wild things) everywhere, each fighting their own battles...for their lives, their loved ones, their ideals, their dreams, their next meal. I thought about the incidental and intentional deaths caused by the decisions we make every day.
On one hand...this is just a bird, one of many, who made a miscalculation that cost its life. It is not the fault of the fence, or the rancher, or the highway, or the bird...but then again, its death is a weight we all should bear.
We all own a share of responsibility for the collateral damage of the choices we make. There is blood on all of our hands for the lives lost in our wars, along the roads we drive, in the factories that make our goods, in the old growth cut for timber and the rainforests burned to clear land for crops or cattle. There is a high price paid for the conveniences that we take for granted.
Like little kids, we hold up our palms and cry "not me! I didn't do it!"...or point fingers "THEY did it! It's their fault!"...but we all do our share of the damage. Every choice we make carries consequences.
It is easy to remember to consider the "big" choices...like who we vote for...but the seemingly inconsequential decisions that we make hundreds of times a day (like what kind of bag carries your groceries home) add up exponentially and may carry even more weight in the long run. We cannot undo the damage overnight...but we can make conscious decisions about how we live each day.
Reduce...recycle...reuse...and repair...
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