The Seagull
I tried to take a picture. It was there right in front of me on the glass as clear as a bell, wings splayed out with its head clearly defined. But like a ghost it seemed to disappear when the lens was pointed in its direction.
A seagull had crashed into our front window while we were away at work and left a perfect dusty imprint of its outline right smack dab in the center. Out on the lawn was a ring of feathers where, what I suppose was a crow, had attacked it’s dead or maimed body and plucked out it’s feathers before finally devouring its meal.
I wanted to preserve it somehow, maybe take the glass out of the window or transfer the impression onto something. Surely this would be great art if I could just find a way to save it. This had everything I thought great art to be; imagery both beautiful and horrid at the same time. The great drama of life and death’s circle, unwrapped in a single moment using feathers no less. All this captured in a gossamer imprint that seemed to get fainter the harder one looked at it.
I’m thinking it was a crow that got to the seagull. Crows know no boundaries for cruelty; they just know a good situation when they see one. The other day I saw them attacking a starling that had been stunned by a passing car. Taking turns to attack it, in between the cars and trucks making their way to work.
Jackson Pollock used to attack his canvas in the same circling way. Throwing paint in a kind of dance; moving from right to left, sometimes leaping over it as if he too were feeding upon a wounded starling or seagull with a broken neck.
I stood on a chair, hoping to capture both the sickening circle of bloody feathers and the imprint on the glass at the same time, but this never really worked. When I got the pictures back they all seem to be about out-of-focus lawns and blurry streets. I could never bring the outline and the feathers into anything as powerful as the first moment I saw it; nothing that captured the size, both of the bird and the ring on the front lawn.
Perhaps I just lack a certain creative hunger; the kind that makes one dance in and out of traffic and weave paint onto the canvas at my feet.
A seagull had crashed into our front window while we were away at work and left a perfect dusty imprint of its outline right smack dab in the center. Out on the lawn was a ring of feathers where, what I suppose was a crow, had attacked it’s dead or maimed body and plucked out it’s feathers before finally devouring its meal.
I wanted to preserve it somehow, maybe take the glass out of the window or transfer the impression onto something. Surely this would be great art if I could just find a way to save it. This had everything I thought great art to be; imagery both beautiful and horrid at the same time. The great drama of life and death’s circle, unwrapped in a single moment using feathers no less. All this captured in a gossamer imprint that seemed to get fainter the harder one looked at it.
I’m thinking it was a crow that got to the seagull. Crows know no boundaries for cruelty; they just know a good situation when they see one. The other day I saw them attacking a starling that had been stunned by a passing car. Taking turns to attack it, in between the cars and trucks making their way to work.
Jackson Pollock used to attack his canvas in the same circling way. Throwing paint in a kind of dance; moving from right to left, sometimes leaping over it as if he too were feeding upon a wounded starling or seagull with a broken neck.
I stood on a chair, hoping to capture both the sickening circle of bloody feathers and the imprint on the glass at the same time, but this never really worked. When I got the pictures back they all seem to be about out-of-focus lawns and blurry streets. I could never bring the outline and the feathers into anything as powerful as the first moment I saw it; nothing that captured the size, both of the bird and the ring on the front lawn.
Perhaps I just lack a certain creative hunger; the kind that makes one dance in and out of traffic and weave paint onto the canvas at my feet.
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