The other day I put up the bird feeder that my wife had given me for my birthday last month. It’s one of those feeders with a camera so you can see the birds up close.
Within 2 hours, we had a squirrel and shortly after that, chickadees, nuthatches and redpolls. I’m getting more than a hundred pings each day with all the hungry birds that come to feed.
Here’s a drawing of one of my visitors, a chickadee who came to rest on one of the lower branches of our oak tree. I drew this on a sticky note to save time and show that you can draw with any kind of supplies that you might have lying around, even when you’re taking a short break at work 🙂
One day I was in the bathroom, washing my hands and with a quick glance down at the sink, I realized that the spacing on the cold and hot water faucet handles appeared to be about the same as one’s eyes. And at that moment I began imagining myself wearing the faucet on my head, almost like a pair of goggles. And I began to think about the symbolism of the water creating a feedback loop from the brain to the eyes and back into the mouth. Maybe I’m drowning in my own thoughts? I don’t know. I will leave that up for interpretation.
I got out my phone and took an awkward bathroom selfie, trying to keep the perspective like that of the handles from the angle that I had taken the other photo. I brought the two images into photoshop and began outlining them with a sketch. In reality, the spigot was a bit shorter, so I decided to elongate it so that it lined up better with my open mouth.
I decided on a vertical composition, slightly off center, focused on the bottom third of the frame. I felt like I needed some leading lines or something interesting going on in the background. Later I looked down at one of our African Violets and noticed how all the stems radiate out from the middle and I realized that this effect would be accentuated if I took a photo with a wide angle lens on my phone and that it would make an interesting background – to focus the attention towards my open mouth, which could be flooded with water at any minute.
They say that art should make you feel something. When I showed this to my wife, she asked if I was ok, which tells me that she felt concerned and maybe a little confused. Would a normal person paint themselves with a faucet on their face? How does it make you feel? Is it cliché or is it a little weird? Let me know in the comments.
