Crop:
I live in a paddy-field landscape where the fields are periodically flooded during the rice-growing cycle. One of my favourite memories of the area was the first time I saw this happen in the field next to us. I looked out of the window in the morning and saw so many birds. Perhaps fifty egrets and pond-herons, plus myna birds, black-winged stilts, lapwings, waterhens, jacanas and probably other things I have forgotten, all within fifty metres of our kitchen window. It was spectacular and up-lifting.
Then with its hint of plowed ridges showing through the water this photograph of a section of a weathered old corrugated metal fence that I took locally reminded me of that flooded field. All that was lacking was the bird-life. Rather than try to fill it with birds I decided to try to recreate a detail and this is the result I came up with. Two egrets leaning forwards with necks coiled as they daintily step through the waters ready for the twitch of a fish or frog.
Full image:
The birds are, of course, natural but the scene is a human construct. I love the wealth of life in this watery world but ache to know what it would have been like before our agriculturisation of the landscape. The plowing is artificial but the flooding would have been an annual event and I am sure the wildlife would have been even more diverse that what I see.
There is a deliberate parallel in this artwork. Wildlife in a human-dominated landscape displayed through artwork using a photograph of weathered urban decay. Nature surviving in our countryside and reclaiming our urban materials.
The oddity here is that the egrets perhaps should be pure white but for at least the first few minutes that morning I was looking against the early light and the birds were all dark silhouettes.
Here is a close-up so you can see some of the wonderful texture in that weathering.
And the photograph in its real orientation without the birds.
The fence itself. The photograph I used for this artwork was of the third panel from the left.
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