This painting became the starting point for the Birds series. I had been looking through a nineteenth-century guidebook when a hand-colored illustration of a goldfinch caught my attention. I drew its small form on a prepared canvas and began to paint it, gradually simplifying the figure into a single, solid shape.

From there the work moved through a rigorous process of layering and removal—painting, sanding, dissolving passages of color, then returning with quick washes and rubbed-out gestures. Through this cycle, the gentle silhouette of the bird, seen from above, began to find its balance on a quiet horizon dividing foreground and background.

In the final composition, the planes of ground and the bird’s form seem to merge and separate at once, dissolving and re-emerging in a restrained palette of close values. The result is a poetic, pared-down image—one that opened the way for the paintings that followed.