Bird by Bird: Winter Cardinal, 11”x14”, acrylic and gouache on canvas

Snow doesn’t come through Hope, Arkansas very often, but when it does, it’s almost always an event. Weather data says the yearly average is under three inches, but a more poetic take says spotting flakes falling in your backyard is akin to laying eyes on a transit of Venus, the canonization of a saint, or incontrovertible proof of the Fouke Monster.

This January, on an extended stay with my mother, we watched snow come down in her backyard—coating the deck with a near-pristine sheet of white, dotted only with the paw prints of the feral cats who had scurried for higher (or at least warmer) ground.

I grew up in Hope, and because snow was so rare, it always felt… magical. Even now, after twenty years in the Midwest, it still feels that way. I don’t mean the panic that sends St. Louisans into a French Toast Fever frenzy—clearing shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. I mean the kind of light that hits your window shades just a bit differently. The kind that makes you stop and look.

And in January, I saw a cardinal.

Bear with me for the crushing levels of basic bitchness in the following sentences, but I just stood there, slackjawed at how beautiful, how resplendent—how red—this thing was, fluttering and hopping against the snowy white backdrop like a match tip dancing with a puff of air. I felt stupid for how transfixed I was. I’ve seen cardinals before. But this one... this one burned.

It perched on a post. It lingered. It posed, like it knew I was watching.

“Take a look,” he might as well have said.

I knew I had to paint that moment.

That was January. A very good month.

I can’t say the same for February.

I had COVID. A dental issue that had been nagging me for a year got worse. And most painfully, a business partnership I had invested in—emotionally, creatively, structurally—fell apart without warning. The support I had started to count on disappeared overnight, and the burden shifted back to me. All of it. Again.

I’ve been behind ever since. On work. On rest. On energy. On just about everything.

When life gets too big or too heavy and I don’t feel like I can do it, I go back to Anne Lamott. She reminds us that when it all feels like too much, sometimes the only way through is to take it bird by bird.

I’ve painted a lot of cardinals in my life. But this one might be the most important.

It’s small—unusually small for me. I painted it quickly, not to overwork it, not to intellectualize it. Just to paint what I saw. Or what I felt. Or maybe what I needed to feel.

I started this piece during the tail end of COVID fatigue. That’s probably why I added those rays of sunlight. Because they weren’t there that day in Hope. And they certainly weren’t there in February.

But I needed to paint that light for myself—to remind myself that brighter days are ahead. And when they’re not, I can still be patient. I can still be kind to myself. I can still keep going.

One bird at a time.
[originally posted on Facebook 3/6/24]