Fine Art Gallery
From a Great Height - Explaining the idea.
I’m going to be frank - for this collection, I’m painting bird shites.
The next obvious question is: why? Well in September 2025 I was struck with a vision - literally an image popped into my head as I was walking the dog - and I started to try to paint it. It became apparent pretty quickly that what I’m painting bears an enormous resemblance to bird shites. As I painted, I tried to work out what on earth I was doing.
I have long held the idea that nothing is boring or irrelevant when you look at it closely enough, and this is the point of the collection. On the surface, a bird shite means nothing at all, but when you think about it more, it tells you lots of things about the world. Just for starters, if you see a bird splat, you know that a bird has been nearby, recently. You could learn more about what kind of bird, what it has been eating, whether it is healthy. From that you could learn about the health of the environment around you, whether it was normal for a given bird to be in the area or not, and so on.
Not only this immediate set of inferences, but this idea connects to the work of Irish musician, writer, poet and podcaster, Blindboy. My work isn’t a direct response to his work, but we’re seeing the same world in similar grains of sand. If you look closely enough at something, you can learn a lot about what is around you. The human influence on the environment is undeniable, and one of the facets of that influence is the way that humans interact with animals both directly and indirectly.
One of the things that has delighted me with this collection is that I keep noticing new ways in which the simple idea of bird shites touches on the world and helps me consider things about life. Who cleans up the bird shites? Why is it that a bird has a healthy or unhealthy diet? Why do they congregate where they do in my small town?
But I do have to admit, there is a kind of rude fun to be had in painting a subject that a lot of people are horrified by the mention of.
Why on Earth would you want to buy a painting of a bird shite?
Well look, I know it’s not for everyone, but I wouldn’t go to the trouble of trying to sell them if I thought that nobody would enjoy them at all.
Literally just as decoration. They’re colourful abstracts. They’re bold. They’re intense. Series 1 in this collection is a variety of sizes, in a fresh green-yellow-white scheme that genuinely looks great on a white wall. The longer you look at them, the more things you will see, like looking at a cloud and seeing dragons.
Statement piece. Talking point. Highly distracting from any odd marks on the wall. You will get to ask any visitors what they see in the painting and you don’t have to tell them the whole explaination, at least not at first!
Conversation starter. These paintings aren’t thoughtless splashes on canvas; as described above, I put real intention and heart into making them over a long period of time, layer by layer. By the time of writing I’ve been painting for about 20 years and these are some of the most meaningful things I have done yet, and each is the result of care, attention and a deliberate process.
