Caffrey Fielding
Bird with Hands
acrylic, charcoal, collage on mat board
16″ x 19″
@caffreyfielding
USA
Caffrey Fielding
Clara Lieu
Art Prof & Partner
Artist Statement
“I am an art student from rural New Hampshire, ready to learn how much I don’t know about art. Most of my work is very expressionistic, and I tend to work more in charcoal, chalk pastel, and oil pastel. I haven’t discovered what subject matter I enjoy the most, but I have recently have gone through a semi-obsession with images of birds with hands. I find that leaving behind marks clearly made by hand keeps the work closer to the artist. The most important part of art to me right now is the life shown behind it.”
“I am an art student from rural New Hampshire, ready to learn how much I don’t know about art. Most of my work is very expressionistic, and I tend to work more in charcoal, chalk pastel, and oil pastel. I haven’t discovered what subject matter I enjoy the most, but I have recently have gone through a semi-obsession with images of birds with hands. I find that leaving behind marks clearly made by hand keeps the work closer to the artist. The most important part of art to me right now is the life shown behind it.”
Related Artists
The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock, Gustave Doré, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, Paula Rego, Max Ernst, William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, Rona Pondick, Romare Bearden, Francis Bacon
Bird enthusiast here! Okay, hopefully you’re still working with birds with hands. Look up marabou storks, adjutant storks, and all of the different vultures and condors. Most of the carrion birds tend to have fleshy bald areas (that keep bacteria and rot from clinging to them) that look a lot like human flesh. The storks especially also have really elongated legs and feet that kind of resemble skeletal arms and hands. It’d be great to see you do some studies of some of these birds and sample the anatomies and textures for your own creations!
Another cinematic reference that would be great for you to look at is Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty of the Beast; a film which is full of mystery and haunting black-and-white imagery but also (perhaps most importantly) a lot of “creepy hands”!
Awesome work! The haunting quality of these is really intriguing! One, please look up the cartoons of Charles Addams (snap, snap) for the New Yorker. He of course is a master at mystery, but also a master of contrast! He makes a cartoon in a dimly lit mansion, shadows everywhere, but still creates balance between the lights and darks to guide the viewer’s eye. Also, of course, Hieronymus Bosch‘s paintings of hell — a lot of birds with human features, and thats not even the strangest thing in there!
I think that scale and quantity would be a great way to explore this concept in the future: working in charcoal on a large scale, really flushing out this concept of the birds with hands in a big way! Whenever I’ve had an obsession with art, it always leads to the best work…if you really go bold and let it lead you.