While splashing paint in my Barracks studio, I heard a tapping on the window, which looks out on to an oak tree. On the windowsill was a very large spotted bird  tentatively tapping the glass with a wicked-looking pointy bill. Spectacular... he had red and black and these beautiful fawn spots.  We looked at each other in the eyes before he moved on.  Knock, knock, knock on the windowpane... wake up, Suzanne!   I rushed out and bought an Audobon Birds of the West identifier.  He was a flicker, a large woodpecker.
There are many synchronicities in painting.  Last year I did a series of large abstracts with a trickster bird tapping on windowpanes.  And the book I was reading, "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman, more or less fell open to a page where he listed hawks and woodpeckers as belonging to the planet Mars, for dangerous, fierce heart energy and passion.   Even the name flicker evokes flame and the color red.  And that wicked beak can probe out sustanance or, equally, draw blood, as all good weapons do.
He seemed to me to evoke iron oxide red, a flaming sienna, a red flash of fire arriving on a two-heater day.

 


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