I SHALL RETURN AS A BIRD

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” – wrote Rousseau.

I often wonder if that one sentence doesn’t already contain everything I feel when painting birds. For I was born outside the chains, and yet I have felt them my whole life. That is why they so often appear on my canvases – to remind me of what is free, untamable, immeasurable, uncompromising, and unreachable.

When I hold in my hand a carefully crafted photograph – rich in color, perfectly capturing the play of light – I feel a flutter in my stomach. What will come of my efforts to breathe life into that frozen moment on canvas? Will my colors lure the viewers and sing to them? Will I manage to capture the delicate stroke of a wing, the shimmering reflection on water streaked with golden and a yearning red in the distance?

Most often I feel that it is the birds themselves who call me. Their wings, their palette of colors, their silhouettes in flight – as if whispering: “Paint us.” At times, a photograph seems to address me directly, to haunt me, to seduce me. And I know that one day I will have to bring it onto the canvas.

I cannot count how many times I have wished to trade places with them. To be, if only for a moment, unbound by earth, by chaos, by the noise of the human world – to fly where silence has color and where the horizon never ends.

One of my first professional paintings was a painting of a robin. I painted it so many times, corrected it, covered it with a white layer, and began again. A scruffy chick would turn into a red-breasted beauty and then back again, until I found its true form. I spent all paint, time, and patience, but I did not give up. And I realized that it is a greater loss for the paint to remain untouched in its tubes, just as it is a greater loss for the desire for life to remain unexpressed within us.

Painting birds is for me both an escape and a return. An escape from the cage into which daily life places me, and a return to the essence I carry within myself – to that something divine which, if only for a moment, is lent to me. In those moments I feel ecstasy: the colors glide, the lines fall into place by themselves, music accompanies the movement of the brush, and everything around me disappears.

I know that birds are not just a motif. They are a portal. They remind us of the world within that we must never forget, of the roots of our indestructibility. When I finish a painting, I feel that it had already existed somewhere, that we had met in another world, and that we now recognize one another.

That is why it is not difficult for me to believe that perhaps, in some future life, I will return as a bird or as some small winged creature ablaze with color. To live without chains, in the freedom of colors and movement, without the burden of having to be, to possess, to desire too much, to have to, but simply to be what I have always sensed while painting – a soothing song in flight, brief, trembling, yet eternal.

If you could, even for a moment, cast off the chains of everyday life, what would you choose to become, I would love to hear your vision of freedom.