Red Legged Bird with a Tale to Tell

Red Legged Bird with a Tale to Tell
43" x 35"

The symbolism is marvelous! A mockingbird is the main character, mocking us as he steals the money. He has red legs, as in "CAUGHT! Red handed!" And his legs are really long, as in, He can walk all over us, and in broad daylight. Surely, he has a tale to tell us? Perhaps you can make up your own? Will your story include the letters AIG?

This is number 2 in my economic series. Maybe it is the last in a short series, it remains to be seen. I made the money by scanning a $20. Did you know that photoshop has issues with scanning US currency? I guess that's a good thing, though it slowed my art down a bit. After manipulating the image, it let me print the tiny bills. I trimmed them with copper, to both help them show up better against the brightly colored landscape and as a reference to the devaluing of the American dollar, as in the $20's are like pennies now. The legs are made from African trade beads....now I am sure there is a story behind those!

And the fabrics, oh lovely fabrics, are made from a number of my batiks.  Some of them have been altered with more layers of batik, and others have been transformed by the miracle of fusible webbing (LOVE that stuff!). The foreground and the sky are also hand dyes. I learned that I suffer from not enough value difference in this pallette. It was difficult to achieve the 3D effect of the buildings that I was going for. I tried to correct that with dense quilting in dark threads, it helped a bit, but is not quite there. Still learning as I go, I love this work!