Blue Bird 2010

Sometimes I make an image because my hands take charge and call all the shots, leaving my poor, befuddled, and ego-centric brain to stew in it's usual soup of problems and worries. For Blue Bird I had two things I'd  made that I was excited about:  one was a strange blue paint peel(made from pouring paint on a non-sticky surface and then pulling it back up once dried), and the other was a painted panel covered in glassine paper that I'd dropped small dots of yellow, orange, and blue paint onto.  Preoccupied with itself, my brain would never have married the paint peel and the spotted surface, but my hands did, casually dropping the dried blue paint on top of the panel without any thought or purpose.  And then, there it was, a bird surrounded by polka-dots.  To make it more bird like, I added the tail, another paint peel, but I didn't change the large paint peel at all because to do so would have  caused it to loose it's integrity, it's innate blue birdness. Even the spotted egg under the bird's feet(made from the negative space of a cast off cut out) was hand selected and not mind directed.  The bird's eye, small and a little squinty, was one of hundreds I keep already cut, so it was just a matter of going through them until I found the right one. 

I did have to engage my brain once I started putting the piece together and finishing it off.  Some of the colors I used were not water proof, and ran when I applied the finish varnish, so my brain had to come up with a solution.  Cranky, it solved the problem, but wasn't happy, feeling under appreciated and under utilized.