A Bird in the Hand is Worth Seven New Collages

Jessica Hagen-Hill, Owner of Jessica Hagen Fine Art,

asked me to participate in the 5th Anniversary Show and Celebration at her gallery this January. Jessica and I met over 5 years ago at her post at the now closed Station 29 in Newport, RI. It was there that we forged a long lasting relationship between Gallerist and Artist. Almost six years later, with

many adventures in our past, I obviously was eager and estatic to, again, join the ranks of artists that have graced the walls of Jessi

ca's Gallery.

Thanks to several of Jessica's clients, I have had the opportunity to call myself an artist over the past six years. From Newport, RI, to Puglia, Italy, and now in Brooklyn, NY, Jessica has provided the services and space for keen collectors to view and appreciate my work. Art Collectors like Susan Ruf

and Michael Walsh, Alessandro Giuliani, and a few others, have trusted my and Jessica's partnership and purchased work that has lead to my continued perseverance in this challenge that is - being an artist.

While working in Brooklyn, NY, (miles away from beautiful Newport...) I still ponder on the beauty

and solitude of the amazingly quiet moments spent in my studio in Newport. Also, my trip to Italy (see older posts...) always seems to creep into my brain while plugging away late night in my studio here in Park Slope...

A place of never-ending noise, this place called Brooklyn has presented itself as a never-ending conundrum of balance between time, space, money, family, and strangers. While I exist in the heart of museum world, each day is a struggle to forfeit

the precious time and cash to get myself uptown to the Geug' or the Met or wherever - or spend those golden minutes on a painting in my studio here at home.

But...Where do the birds fit in?

Some folks know me as a bird watcher, some as a bird hunter, but either way, I love the "winged, bipedal, endothermic, vertabrate animals that lay eg

gs." (thanks wikipedia...)

The image of the bird crept into early paintings...three of which began the Jessica Hagen /Kevin Gilmore art relationship.

For the past few years, birds have not landed on my canvas.

Recently the birds have landed in Brooklyn:

A poem by Anne Pierson-Wiese if i may:

Birds Hitting Glass

On the way to my job the other day I sawa pigeon sail out of the park on a tide of morning light, coast weightless across the wide street and swoop smack into the glass wall of a bus stop shelter. There was the soft sound of a pillow being punched, the bird slid down against the glass, wings frozen askew mid-flight and then suddenly was up — rebounding into the air, gaining altitude gradually like a small plane with a bomb in its belly, banking over the traffic uncertainly and returning to the shelter of the trees,leaving in the fine dust on the glass a faint tracery of feathers at point of impact. This made me remember other birds hitting glass. The hawk diving with unerring aim from high leaves along the parkway, as if lured by the windshield’s flash, and glancing off darkly — half thud, half flap into the shoulder grass. The partridge storm-blown with a neck-snapping crash into a cottage window in Vermont, cracking the ripple-edged19th century glass — hard to know how, lifting its sleek, freckle-feathered, hollow-boned body from the sodden and soil-spattered fern border the next morning — like air breaking ice. The chickadees drunk on the cherries that liefermenting in the sun each summer outside the new library with its blue-stoned walk, ornamental fruit trees, and three-story plate glass wall designed to let the public glimpse tiers of books inside but proving fatal to the scores of tiny birds taking off tipsywith all the conviction that accompanies drunkenness. The shock of slamming up against reality happens more slowly when you don’t have wings.