Birds

I never thought I would become an observer of bird behaviour. Since being adopted by three generations of Butcherbirds who come to my balcony to be fed, I have given them all a name. This interest in birds has manifested itself in a particular way in this group of paintings. The only portrait is of a bird I have called Ginger, a simple direct painting on hessian.

Two works are painted on English furnishing linen purchased in Tokyo. For one I recalled Scarlet O’Hara and imagined her with a budgerigar after seeing Gone with the Wind again on television. The other I used a found photograph of two dancers and placed a red parrot on top of a head. Another work is painted on vintage wool, a macabre scene of a bird with an insect, a common sight observed in nature.

The final painting is a representation of an English “dolly bird,” the most glamorous female signifier one could imagine in the Australia of the nineteen sixties.

—Jenny Watson, January 2014