Ev'ry Bird & Wind Drawings Series 1

Limited edition of 24 drawings by birds and wind, each drawing represents 12 hours or day or night.

I get ear-worms of poetry sometimes. Recently I’ve been plagued by this quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. ”How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?’. It is percussive and insistent. What senses have I closed and what do the Birds know that I don’t?

I am lucky enough to have a little garden. I have crammed it full of stuff, including one elder tree that planted itself. It has a rose bush that twines through it and it is next to thick bay bush. My garden attracts little chattery sparrows and great tits. Occasionally I get a majestic blackbird and far too frequently pigeons visit to dig up my seedlings. I lure the birds with fat balls and tasty treats and as they feed and fight over the food, the bird feeder swings.

Garden bird on drawing machine. Photo by T Green

One of my lockdown projects was to harness this movement and turn it into lines and patterns. I developed a series of drawing machines that convert the movement of birds into lines. Series 1 is from the first drawing machine.

The first 12 days of June 2020 had a ritual to them. Every morning I typed up the days weather forecast and loaded up the drawing machine. The day drawing was from 8am to 8pm. At 8pm I swapped the paper for a new sheet typed with the forecast for the next 12 hours and changed the pen to a dark colour.

During the day I changed ink colour when the temperature changed, working to a colour chart I developed that could be harmonious as well as vibrant, depending on the days selections.

Still days created blots and build up of ink. Windy days made wild scratches across the paper. Rain swelled the paper and stalled the pen, creating solid areas of colour.

These drawings fit perfectly into 10 x 8 inch (25 x 20cm) frames with a 7 x 5 inch (18 x 13cm) mount opening. Due to the nature of birds and wind some of the image may hidden under the mount but most of it will be visible.