Avian Ascensions

The Avian Ascension series began when I was walking my dog Zoe around my neighborhood in the weeks before Halloween, the costumed American children’s candy-infused, cartoonish ode to sugar and death. I took many photos of skeletons, ghosts, and ethereal spirits in people’s windows, porches, and front yards. In response to working on and editing those photos, I later found skeletal x-rays of my body from personal health issues and incorporated those interior illumination images into many new artworks. Soon I found myself adding birds to that boneyard series of images, rising through rib cages and above skulls in a flying transcendental visual effort to ascend above the physical world.

Soon, all vestiges of the skeletal world were gone from those images and all that remained were birds and the vast broad and boundless skies where they live and soar.

As with all of my artwork, work inspires and begets even more work; so the series continued on in ways I never could have initially imagined.

This series is dedicated to the memory of my dear mother, who loved birds of any feather and had bird feeders in every house that she ever lived in. May her spirit continue to soar in her ascension beyond this world and outside of the magnet of planetary gravity.