Birdland Statement

[Artguy]

Artist Statement - Kurt Rostek - Birdland

They take flight, light upon trees, trace moving shadows on the earth. They are things of myth and legend. The Raven is said to have brought light to the north. Prometheus had his liver torn out by an Eagle only to have it grow back again so the Eagle could tear it out again the next day. This was the wrath of Zeus. I walk into my garden to hear the twitter of sparrows all around me, and with every step I look to acknowledge them. Every autumn I put out a bird feeder to nourish them for the long journey that I wish I made with them.

As a young boy we moved from the whirl of the city to a place I could not imagine. There were wide open fields as far as the eye could see. Trees as tall as any building where I once lived. What really caught my young eye though were the birds. They were everywhere. They were large, small, yellow and blue. Some ran across the ground, some hung in the sky silhouetted beneath the clouds.

In one way or another birds have been a large part of consciousness throughout my life. It was when we moved to our rural home when I first took notice of them and started to draw them and then paint them with an eager eye.

Birdland has given me the chance to relive and deconstruct that experience to suit my adult consciousness. I have returned to the city, and see the world with urban eyes. In this series it is their birdness that intrigues me. There is in each painting the outline of a bird's form and now much more.. All around me are lines describing a melange of forms, and they fly darting around them. This is what you see in these paintings, the bird form intermingled with urban form to such a degree that the bird form almost, and in some cases completely disappears.

Neither the city nor the birds have been embellished with colour, that may have given one prominence over the other. Straight black and white allows true integration. As I have grown to integrate all I have learned and unlearned into this thing called me, so have the birds and the city in birdland merged to become something called them.