The 20th Century Room
Vista del Ocell
2003, Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 23"From Tibidabo, on the hill above the city, you can see everything, and one thing I observed was a bead-eyed magpie which hopped cautiously in circles around us as we threw small pieces of a chocolate bar to a pair of bustling and greedy pigeons. Something about the difference in attitude between the two kinds of birds drew me down into their little scene, and I was pleased by the idea that a “bird's-eye view” might actually be a ground-level one.
In the historic region of Catalunya they favor their own point of view as well, whatever its virtues, and offer their own language, Catalan, as the local alternative to Spanish. It's an odd tongue, with grammar and vocabulary that borrows a little from French, a little more from Italian. So the birds in Barcelona are not pájaros or oiseaux but ocells.
