Mattiscombe: Beaks, Bills and Belonging

For the past four years I've been spending time at a particularly beautiful stretch of coast in South Devon called Mattiscombe. It's become a site of special interest for me and many others due to the abundance of flora, fauna and wildlife. On a good day, you'll catch sightings of Stonechats, Cirl Buntings, Seals, Peregrine Falcons, Osyter Catchers, and Kestrals.

The Stonechat, with it's striking black head, white collar and reddish body perches atop gorse thickets making them the ideal subject for painting. For me though, it's not just about depicting birds, and beauty, It's about something else.... it's about culture, it's about movement, migration, magic. There's a spiritual dimension....questions of 'how on earth can all this be possible' often creep in to my mind....

Some years ago whilst working on a project with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology I came across the work of Dr Drew Lanham, who's film Reflections of a Cultural Ornithologist, struck a chord. He describes how when seeing the arching back of the Whimbrel its reminds him of his forefathers and their arching backs as they worked in the fields in his homeland. So the cultural dimension becomes his connection to the birds.

The stonechat seems somehow to act in a similar way for me. The slightest tilt of the head, and suddenly there's an act of love or loss. A glimpse between two thickets becomes symbolic of something else, a story from the past, and pairing with some ancestral memory perhaps, or a reminder of time spent with loved ones.

My great hero (amongst many other painters), it the great Bill Lynch, who was able to fully understand how something as simple as a bird and a plant could impart so much information than the sum of it's parts. His use of space (on salvaged bits of wood) create great tension between one mark and another and somehow he's able to tell an epic tale from just from a few brushstrokes.

Its the twist of a head, the direction of a beak, the position in relation to plant, water or sky....that conjure up all those great stories, and connect us to a place in time.

Image courtesy of Approach Gallery, London.

Bill Lynch

No title [Bird on Branch], n.d.

Oil on wood

50.2 x 38.1 cm 19 3/4 x 15 in.