Birds have been a strange obsessive part of my life ever since I was twelve years old. In fact I can remember the exact year, day, and time that it began. Looking back on it now nearly twenty years later it seems as though it was meant to happen, for if it didn't I find it terrifying to postulate what type of person I potentially could have evolved into if it weren't for that Northern Goshawk that had landed on a branch on that oak tree in my parents backyard- I might have just become someone who simply did not care.
My families back lot was composed of a rural thick deciduous forest of oaks, beech, maple and hemlock that extended miles out in a northern Massachusetts town called, Ashburnham. (ASH-burn-ham, noun; 1. A town of the United States being the only one in the country with such a name. 2. Historical records indicate Ashburnham was founded by a sect of devout alcoholic pilgrims banished from Holland who arrived in a ship in 1726 called, The Lady Slipper.)

It was a cool, clear fall day when it actually used to get cold back then on November 22, 1989 and myself, my sister, and my cousin Joel were home from one of those half days that we would have during the week leading up to Thanksgiving. (I was thirteen and they were both twelve at the time.) We were home alone because our parents all worked and we would raise hell running around in the house playing tag in our bare socks on the shiny wood floors, slipping around and ripping light sockets out of the wall. So it was that fateful moment when my cousin Joel had spotted the middle sized hawk as we slid across the family room floor as we all slid by the glass deck door which giving us full view of the back woods.

Joel spotted something outside and shouted, "Wow, did you see that!?"

There was a large hawk that had landed on a branch in the backyard. We all ran up stairs to view it at a closer range and I was so near it that I was mesmerized by its blood red eyes that were surrounded by a speckled slate grey plumage. A few days later I looked up that it was a Gos-Hawk, an indigenous species to the northern woods of New England and Canada.

I was hooked from that moment and I immediately became OBSESSED with everything bird. I drew them, read everything about them, l familiarized myself with nearly every species in North America, wept for species long gone from this Earth, wrote papers on them and forced teachers to read them, I built houses and feeders and bought feeders that had the latest in technology that was meant to deter dreaded nuisance squirrels from disturbing my beloved birds.

I wore images of them on my clothing to school, cardinals, wood ducks, anything! It might be fair to say that this obsession I had eradicated any typical and normal interest I might of otherwise have shared with my fellow junior high classmates such as sports, crime, teen intercourse, smoking pot, or what ever it was the outside world was doing. My rather obvious and unusual bubble I submerged myself in was something that targeted me for ridicule.

At first I was unaware to it, but as the frustration and impatience of being confined behind school walls became a drudgingly acceptable norm, the constant badgering and mindless dribble that gushed form the holes in their faces irritated my senses like the pungent musk of a foul skunk, and eventually all I wanted to do was block their unfathomable stench. It all culminated roughly a year later when I was sitting at a cafeteria lunch table and I was wearing a t-shirt that was adorned by a pair of Northern Cardinals I had gotten at the Kittery Trading Post in Kittery, Maine. Tim Murphy who was my year was expected to be a great football player for the varsity football team at Oakmont. He sat across from me, didn't say anything for a moment, and just gawked with his pale blue eyes before remarking, "Birds, why birds...why don't you just play football?" I didn't say anything in return, instead I just sat there feeling crushed that something I loved so much was a reason for people to hate. That day I walked home after getting dropped off from the bus and forced myself from looking into the sky.
Two years later as a sophomore I was in homeroom before classes began and over the TV on our school news program it was announced that Oakmont had beaten our arch rivals on Friday night against Gardner, but after the game, in his first varsity game Tim Murphy slipped in the shower and broke his arm so severely that bone tore through the flesh ruining his promising football future, and I knew at that moment my journey with birds had just begun.

So it has been through out the years that birds keep reappearing in my art in a variety of forms and context. I painted them when I was thirteen out of sheer innocence, and then twelve years later I found myself fully illustrating a calendar of birds of the lower Manhattan area for the Hudson River Park for educational awareness. It was a chance to reconnect and rediscover why birds continue to be this mysterious fascination. And now I am using my naturalistic painting style and blending that with my satire towards humanity. I want to use the image of the 'bird' as a symbol of destruction it itself faces because of the behavior of humanity and then give the bird human characteristics. What if nature were to start acting as strangely as we do, we would surely say it's, 'unnatural'.