A majority of my senior project has been painting things around me — namely birds and little landscapes — so for the end of my project, I wanted to step into some more conceptual waters. One day while watching a Ruby Crowned Kinglet flutter around catching insects in a tree, I thought about how horrifying it would be if we were the size of the insects. I quickly sketched out the idea, and after talking to James and my cohort, I realized that there is a symbolic potency to the image of birds attacking people in a time such as this — nature turned on humans, there’s either a Jurassic Park or fairy tail implication. From there I thought about places people want to go, but don’t feel safe going to. I thumbnailed a bunch of ideas and landed on the setting of a church. I decided to go through all the steps, I planned out a composition and did color studies (pictured below). I settled on a reddish orangish sky color, with a dark green ground and gray church.

I also knew that this was the type of painting that I could really tell a story through the people; so I wrote out a few stories, and then selected the imagery from them, and translated them into my drawing, and then into the painting. On the left side, there’s an old lady who stands with their arms open towards the bird above them. There’s a man on his knees with a cross, above him a woman is skewered on a bird’s beak. In the background, there are clergymen getting into a car, ready to escape. I made the conscious decision to use a small songbird as my subject instead of an eagle or some other bird of prey. Having an eagle dive at you is terrifying enough as is, but a little songbird smaller than a child’s fist? They seem so harmless.

Here is the final painting: