Death of a Thrush

On painting grief, stillness, and the quiet passing of time

Some paintings wait. They begin not with an idea, but with a feeling — a surface marked and layered, then left in silence until life catches up with them.

This painting started in the studio months ago. I worked into it intuitively, responding to what wanted to appear, then stepped away, unsure of where it was leading. It sat unfinished — quiet but alive — waiting for something more.

Then the bird appeared.

A young thrush, found in a bucket of water — soaked, barely breathing. I held him in my hands, trying to warm him, but he was already on the threshold. One eye remained open, faintly alert, until it clouded over and closed. Quietly. Entirely.

It was only then that I returned to the painting and understood what it had been waiting for. It wasn’t that the bird became the subject — it’s that his death gave the painting its breath, its stillness, its weight.

I didn’t add anything literal. I didn’t need to. The work already carried traces of that fragile moment, even before I had lived it. I followed what was already there — and completed it.

Fine dotted lines wind through the composition — visible and deliberate. To me, they hold something more than decoration: fragments of the soul. Mine and the bird’s. Not mournful, not symbolic, but quiet. A shared breath that moved on.

And throughout the surface, partially buried under layers of paint, textured lines spread across the canvas — more visible in some places than others. They were there from the beginning, not added after the fact. I see them as roots, not because they mimic them exactly, but because they speak of something spreading, connecting, anchoring — and ultimately, reclaiming. They remind me of the slow but certain way the earth takes everything back. Including us.

Though I feel far from the end of my own life, this experience left a mark. It sharpened my sense of time — of how quietly and inevitably it moves through us. Of how little we can hold.

This painting is not a portrait of loss. It’s a space for something softer: a breath, a release, a letting go. It’s about what lingers after — and what continues beneath the surface.