I've been using a lot of words in my paintings recently and this piece is one which is about the potential of paintings speaking almost literally, but without words.
The birds seem like an obvious choice to symbolize voices, which represent for me the possibility that if you don't say things verbally, you are bound to say them in some other way.
It was enjoyable to refer to beautiful illustrations in "The Sibley Guide to Birds" for the poses and contemplate the marvelous nature of birds. As I was doing it I had a vivid memory of how I felt I was having the most fun ever, when in first grade, I painted these really large tempera illustrations for a book report about the Swallows of Capistrano.
If you aren't familiar with the story, it is about how flocks of swallows return to the mission of San Juan Capistrano, California every year on the same date, March 19th. This mysterious animal ability makes me wonder how all these swallows know to go to the same place on the same day.
There is always the theory that maybe they are all the same swallow, much the same as the physicist Richard Feynman's suggestion that electrons will continue to act alike despite a separation of time and space because they are all the same electron.
Which is a roundabout way of getting back to my memory of painting the swallows and thinking again, as I have thought many times about many works, that I am always painting the same painting.