100 x 100 cm
Oil on canvas
2024
 
There are blackbirds in the valley where I live in Italy. They are so plain, seemingly so unremarkable, until they cut loose their sweet song. Here, the blackbirds sing in a cacophony back and forth to one another across the valley. They are a constant reminder of all the life we humans cannot know.
 
Then one day, in midsummer, the blackbirds stop, usually around a full moon. There is a saying here that they go to sleep when the green is the greenest, to awaken again in the golden fall. It is a mystery.
Like most things.
 
This is the time of the sleeping blackbird.