EDITION INFORMATION

This is a piece from my most recent series of paintings,Tweet Suite: Birds of North America. Lately I've found myself focusing more on nature in my work – in this case, common regional birds of America. It just so happens that soon after I completed the series, the Audubon Society reported that twenty of our most common birds - the ones we most often take for granted – have lost more than half their populations in the past forty years.

The painting's background is made of vintage trading stamps. I love how randomly the stamps are pasted onto the individual pages. I usually find them in completed books, which means that some housewife (generally) saved up all her stamps from grocery shopping and then pasted them into the books, and depending on her personality, she was either really neat and obsessive about it or made a mess, and that can be seen in the grids. And then you have to take a moment to mourn the fact that these particular stamps were never cashed in for the toaster or whatever. And now they have found a new life, forty years later.