little birds...
I am still baffled by the mystery of how man has an independent life from woman, whereas I die when separated from my lover. While all these threads of desire and tenderness stifled me, I climbed into a giant bird and swooped toward space. Up here I do not suffer. Distance is magically covered. It is a dream. It is an inhuman bird that carries me to a new destiny. I rise. [Anaïs Nin, December 1939][from Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947][...]
[Roman Standard, Tracey Emin, Snape, Suffolk]I started drawing birds because I liked them and because they’re pretty [...] They represent something to me which is heavenly, because they fly. It’s like ascension. That was a time in my life when I really needed to rise above the situation I was in, and birds seemed the perfect metaphor for me. [...] The Roman Standard came through that way of thinking. [...] What I’m saying through the piece is that strength isn’t always about being big. [Tracey Emin, May 2013][Vanity Fair: Artist Tracey Emin: Critics Are Harsher Because I’m a Woman][...]
[Paul Klee, Bird Garden [Vogelgarten], 1924, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]This lovely, fantastic, absurdly comic garden scene is as much music as painting. We feel that on our pulses as we look at it. Its lovely incongruities provoke delight. Each of those brash, small birds, so perkily self-assured, sounds like a single brazen struck note, usually quite a high note because they are treading very delicately upon the tops of all the leaves and all the plants [...] Not one of them is flying. They have no such ambitions. They are perfectly, harmoniously at rest, picking their way back and forth, round and round, across the tops of equally fragile and delicate natural things. [Michael Glover][The Independent: Great Works: Bird Garden, 1924, Paul Klee]