Flight of the Grackle

Original oil painting on linen.
2026

Da Vinci once said, "Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards". And since my last visit to Slovakia this has become more apparent. Photos and paintings struggle capture the shifting perspectives of looking from the ground up to a mountain, a tree or the clouds in the sky without distortion and tricks, even this painting is no exception. But still, I wanted to mimic that perspective of craning your neck and looking up, and the subsequent unfathomable and enigmatic thoughts of scale and grandeur.

The iridescent streaks glide above us through the thicket of branches and trees, breaking through the canopy and into the endless sky, illuminated by the rich love and passion of the sun. Our gaze attempts to pursue the flight of the grackle, their dance through the swaying trees but is obscured by the shifts of light and scattered foliage. They escape our sight, only to reappear in a flash of purple, green, orange or blue, and disappear just as quickly.

I've since discovered that the only way to truly capture grandeur is to adapt a parallel perspective as seen in traditional East Asian art and make it large enough that the audience to forced to shift their perspective. That will have to wait until I have a larger studio. Until then, I need to remind myself not the focus on the leaf or tree but the forest in its entirety.

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