Given To Fly

Given To Fly

By now most of you may know that I have devoted over 20 years to the same Red-tailed hawk.  Next year, she will be going on thirty years old!  A bit of natural history:  only in captivity will they live that long; in the wild their life span is much shorter.  We pride ourselves on taking the best care of our raptors at Ryerson Conservation.  If she lives to thirty-one, our hawk will be the oldest Red-tailed to live that long in these United States!  That is an unbelievable goal, and one that we hope to aspire to.

The art piece above, Given To Fly, (also seen to the right as my Facebook avitar), is one of many art tributes to our hawk that I've made.  The title is a song lyric that I've put on a teabag tag hung from a cluster of bamboo sticks.  Dina Wakley didn't know that when she created this stencil,

that she made it for me.  I roughly spread modeling paste thru the image and cut it into a circle when dry.  Also used is a bit of coffee filter that I rusted, handmade paper, paper that I've dyed, and a line of tissue paper text.  A simple configuration of collage that tells a bit of my story.