Simultaneously inhabiting the earth and the sky, birds are a poignant symbol of human perceptual limitation, living in our realm while observing from above. The grisaille birds here are all victims of window strikes and as such embody—as both a literal and a cautionary tale—the collision between the human and the natural world. The window drawing simultaneously suggests a window, the sky, a reflection of the sky, a shape, a color.

To create the small drawings in the window-strike series, I use layers of India ink, diluted with water and applied with brush onto Rives BFK paper. Drawing from photos of window strikes that I or friends have taken provides an intimate point of connection to my subjects. The slow building up of layers of ink allows time to develop a relationship with each bird and wonder about its death while honoring its life. 

These works are part of an ongoing body of work that I call False Azure. Several years ago, while drawing living birds, I was introduced to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. The novel is built around a long poem, and I became captivated by the poem’s images and the implied dichotomies between imagination and reality, intentional and unintentional harm, and even life and death:

    I was the shadow of the waxwing slain 
    By the false azure in the windowpane; 
    I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I  
    Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.